Miss Trust?
by Zettel
Summary: Chuck and Sarah meet for the first time as professors at a Florida college. They are in their mid-thirties. Will their pasts and the complications of their present keep them apart, despite their mutual attraction? A rom-spy-dramedy.
1. Chapter 1: Bell the Cat

**A/N** This is a small, quiet story, focused on two people and their struggle to trust each other and to trust themselves. Call it a _rom-spy-dramedy_ (heavier on the drama than the comedy-although the whole thing is a _comedy_ in the classical sense.) It will be 9 chapters long.

I have reimagined Chuck and Sarah here. They are near their mid-thirties when they meet the first time. The details of their histories are somewhat different. This is true of the other characters too.

If you want lots of shoot 'em-up, long car chases or endless masochistic angst, you will not find it here. We can part company now with no hard feelings. This isn't all fluff by any means (there are a few dark, angsty moments) but mostly there's a lot of talk around a number of important flashbacks.

Thanks to michaelfmx for careful beta work on the chapter.

Except for this chapter (a prelude), the other Chapters of the story subdivide the four days (Friday-Monday) of the 2017 Labor Day weekend.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

* * *

"'But if you are _certain_ , isn't it that you are shutting your eyes in the face of doubt?'—They are shut." Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Philosophical Investigations_

"Since mistrust believes nothing at all, it does just the opposite of what love does…What then is the deep secret of mistrust? It is a misuse of knowledge…Love is the very opposite of mistrust, and yet is initiated in the same knowledge…[L]ove knows better than anyone else everything that mistrust knows, and yet without being mistrustful; loves knows what experience knows, but it also knows that what men call experience is really a mixture of mistrust and love." Soren Kierkegaard, _Works of Love_

"There are two kinds of light—the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures." James Thurber, _Lanterns and Lances_

* * *

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The middle of the second full week of classes, Fall Term

Boca Raton, Florida

Main Campus, Commonwealth College

* * *

CHAPTER 1 Bell The Cat

* * *

Sarah Walker finished preparing the last of the exercises for the Italian class she was to teach in ten minutes. She was annoyed with herself. She normally had all the exercises prepped days before class and was able to review them ahead of time, making sure she had notes about how each exercise tied back to the lectures. But her normal, carefully kept schedule had unwound on her: she was having a difficult time keeping her mind focused. Her mind wandered any time she allowed it to idle—on her morning run, drinking her coffee, trying to read, etc., etc.

'Wandered': that was not the right word, not really. That implied that her mind was aimless, drifting. No, the truth was that her mind was traveling in an all-too-straight line, a line right to that disturbing computer science professor and his smile, his looks, and his touch.

She took a deep breath and blew it out hard. She grabbed a dry erase marker and double-checked her bag. Her textbook was there and a stack of marked quizzes from the day before. She slung her bag on her shoulder and headed out across the quad. Her class would take up the next seventy minutes. That was good. It would be seventy minutes during which her mind would not…wander.

}o{

As she walked into class and felt the familiar stares of the male students, and the (often) unfriendly glares of her female ones, she reflected as she often did on the cost of beauty. Yes, she was beautiful. She knew that. She was also entering her mid-thirties. Her beauty was an advantage, even in classes. It made it easy to get the attention of the students—male or female, students noticed beauty. But it was too often the wrong kind of attention. The males ogled her; the females shot her eyes-narrowed, sidelong glances. So, her beauty was also a disadvantage.

At least at thirty-four, her students were no longer as likely to hit on her or to hang around with love-struck looks. She was glad of that. Teaching was hard enough without all those…extra layers of complication. Besides the way those extra layers complicated things, they also were a constant reminder to Sarah that she was alone. During her stronger moments, she told herself that she wanted to be alone. She had chosen to be alone and she would keep her resolve. But during weaker moments, she had to admit that the cost of her choice, and the keeping of it, was increasing weekly.

}o{

As her class ended, two of her students, Robert and Cheryl, got up and joined hands as they left the room. They'd found each other in a previous class in the Spring and Sarah had watched as Cheryl worked, with great care and caution, but also with great determination, to bring herself to Robert's notice. He was red-headed and handsome in an easy-going, genial way, and quite bright. He had, without knowing it, captured Cheryl's attention on the first day, when he took her side in a classroom discussion about the inherent value of learning a foreign language. Robert had agreed with Cheryl, argued in favor of her point, and credited her for her insight.

Leading the discussion, Sarah had been able to see Cheryl's face move from surprise, to delight, to respect. Cheryl had watched Robert put on his backpack and leave before she got up to leave herself. She stood and looked at Sarah. She realized that Sarah had witnessed her entire reaction to Robert and she smiled shyly. Sarah smiled back conspiratorially. Cheryl stepped lightly out of the classroom. Cheryl was tall and thin and attractive, more attractive as you got to know her, and especially when her intelligence animated her face. Sarah thought she had a fighting chance with Robert, despite his obvious popularity with the other young women in the class. Robert was no fool. If he could appreciate Cheryl's mind—and he obviously could—he might be worth her interest.

He had been. They had found each other officially around Spring mid-semester, during long study sessions that neither had used to much effect, given their shaky midterm scores. But they were both unshakably happy and it showed on their faces. They'd been completely wrapped up in each other for months now. As they left class holding hands, Sarah looked at their hands and immediately felt the emptiness of hers, despite the handful of papers in one and the straps of her bag in the other. She envied the way each had a handful of the other, of the other's hand. She envied them their whole romance.

}o{

She left the classroom and walked over to the Union. The Florida humidity made her wilt. She had never gotten used to it, not even after living there for a year. She was a desert girl, raised in Nevada, and the Florida heat on its own would have been no problem for her. But it was not just _hot_. Living there was like being wrapped in a wool blanket soaked in nearly boiling water. Stifling, oppressive—and itchy and slimy all at once. She was deeply glad to step out of the sunlit quad into the shadowy, chilly air-conditioning of the Union student lounge.

She bought a cold bottle of water and sat down at a table. She had a new book she was reading. She was looking forward to getting back to it. It was Ezra Pound's _ABC of Reading._ She wanted to keep her mind occupied. She was also trying to write a book herself and had found that a little reading each day helped clear her mind to write. The Pound book was good for that purpose, pugnacious and personal, and provocative. It was a good book to read in snippets.

She got out the salad she had packed for lunch. She had cooled down enough to eat. She read as she ate. Between bites, her eyes scanned the Union, not so much for anyone in particular but out of habit, taking note of the number of people around her, their position relative to her and relative to each other, taking note of the exits and vantage points, taking note, taking note, _taking note_. That old habit was hard to break. She had tried but not taking note made her anxious.

She couldn't break the habit, but she had nearly gotten rid of the low-grade fear that had been the baseline of her life for so many years. Most days, she did not feel that fear anymore, she just felt numb. That was not obviously an improvement. It was in one way because the fear was exhausting. The numbness was not exhausting. It was just _there_.

The numbness was like a rock so big that her path came to seem impassible. The numbness just made her want to sit down and down and down. And never get up.

She had begun to think that low-grade fear or numbness were her only two choices when she ran into the newest computer science hire. He didn't cause low-grade fear and he certainly did not cause numbness. Mostly, he pissed her off. She wasn't sure why.

No, she was sure why if she was honest with herself. He had been very pleasant, very polite. He had looked at her in a way that affected her. He had touched her and it had affected her. He made her like him. And that pissed her off. It pissed her off. It sure pissed her off.

She finished her salad, spearing the final bite of tomato with visible violence.

"Damn, I know it's hard to believe that it's a fruit, but what did that tomato ever do to you? It can't be that it's red."

Sarah looked up from her speared tomato and into the skeptical eyes of Carina, her best friend at Commonwealth. Carina was a tall woman, willowy and redheaded. She taught modernist novels in the English department. She specialized in James Joyce. (She had recommended the Pound book Sarah was reading.) Carina was a free spirit, but prone to wild ups-and-downs. She was always at a party, it seemed, even when by herself, but it was hard to predict if the party was a wake or a luau. Sarah had often thought it fitting that such a woman would spend her time writing on _Finnegans Wake_ —a book that, despite its title, was somehow simultaneously a wake and a luau.

Carina folded herself in half and sat down. She had wide-set blue eyes and a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose and over her cheekbones. She smiled her usual high-wattage smile. "So, what's got you in a mood, other than the heat?" Carina was a lifelong Floridian and seemed to Sarah to have a little reptile mixed into her biological heritage. She wasn't cold-blooded, but she didn't seem quite warm-blooded either. Whatever the explanation, Carina rarely seemed bothered by the heat. In fact, she was often in her backyard, reclined in a plastic chaise lounge, sunbathing while reading the latest articles on Joyce. The sunbathing never seemed to affect her mood swings—just as they never seemed to result in her getting tanned. This all added to the reptilian hypothesis for Sarah, but she never spoke of any of it to Carina. She liked Carina, a lot, probably because she was challenging. Judging by the beginning of the conversation, this was a luau day for Carina. That seemed fair enough since it had been more of a wake day, a wake few days, for Sarah.

"I don't know. I'm just out of sorts. Nothing has seemed right to me since the new faculty party. I've been…off…since then."

"Yes, you have been off—because you want someone _on_ , as in _on top of you_. That new guy: what's his name? I can't seem to…recall it…"

"Charles-Chuck," Sarah offered, knowing that Carina would hold out that 'recall it' for as long as necessary to get Sarah to name the name that Carina knew full well.

Carina cut off the 'recall it' abruptly. "Oh, yes, that's right, _Charles_. _Chuck._ He's kind of a big deal, isn't he?

"Well, he was." Sarah looked up, engaging her remarkable memory. "A _wunderkind_. Went to Stanford before he finished high school. Got his computer engineering degree in a couple of years. Graduate school—still at Stanford. International medals. Got his Ph.D. at 22. Hired by Stanford as a faculty member. Tenured at an age when many are still in grad school.

"But then his wheels came off for some reason. No new research or publications. Started not showing up to teach classes. Got more and more erratic. Ended up a liability. Stanford basically forced him to move. No similar school would touch him. Somehow, he ended up here at Commonwealth. I guess they figure the risk is worth it, since he's now the most famous—and infamous—faculty member at our school."

"Good to know you know nothing about him."

"I hear things."

"Did he tell you any of that at the new faculty party?"

"How'd you know I talked to him there?"

"I didn't until you just told me, blondie."

Sarah frowned. She hated being called that and only allowed Carina to get away with it once in a while. No one else could get away with it, ever. For a professor of foreign languages, and a beautiful one, Sarah seemed to intimidate those who spent much time around her—physically intimidate them, not just intellectually. She was tall and gracefully figured, and there was nothing about her that struck the eye as dangerous. But there was something about the way she carried herself, something about the way she moved, like she was a thinly veiled threat. She seemed coiled by habit, ready to strike at all times. Most of the people around her would not have been able to put it quite into words, but they all felt it.

All, except for Carina. She seemed as untouched by Sarah's unintentional intimidation as she was untouched by the Florida heat.

"So, what did _Dr. Who_ say that has you so riled up?"

"Dr. _who_?"

"No, you know, _Dr. Who_."

"Wait. You mean The Doctor—the _Tardis_ guy."

"Yeah, that's who I mean, but I really mean _Chuck_. No fair trying to distract me."

Sarah smirked slightly. Carina always assumed that she was innocent of popular culture, but Carina thought that was because Sarah rated herself above it, whereas the actual explanation was just that Sarah had been too busy working to keep up with it. Carina was beginning to catch on to that. She was also beginning to catch on to Sarah's ability to manipulate conversations so as to keep from answering questions.

Sarah pursed her lips. It went against her grain, but maybe it would help her figure out what was going on if she told a little of it to Carina. This…wandering in her thoughts was going to keep bothering her if she didn't get herself clear of it, understand it. What had…Chuck…done to her?

}o{

 _Sarah had to go to last year's new faculty party because, well, she was new faculty. Her department chair expected it since she would introduce her at one point during the event. "New professor of foreign languages, on part-time appointment also in Political Science (International Relations), Sarah Lisa Walker." She had borne up under it well enough—and she was glad to be there. It had been a long journey. She was unsure she had made the right choice in becoming a professor, but anything was better than remaining what she had been._

 _Anyway, she had planned not to attend this year's party, but she had the misfortune of running into her department chair in the hallway only moments before the party was supposed to begin_ , _and she had felt obliged to tag along. She'd been working to resist her instinct to lie in such situations, so she bit her tongue and let Helen Ventura, her chair, lead her on._

 _She had sat distracted through the event, thinking about her book, when the chair of computer science, a large fleshy man whose name she could never remember, got up and introduced Charles Bartowski. Her first reaction had been to laugh under her breath when Charles, without thinking, corrected his department chair: "It's Chuck." There was general laughter. He blushed._

 _He was not so handsome that you would imagine him on a magazine cover. But he was tall and lean and remarkably boy-like for a man she was sure was practically the same age she was. He had brown eyes and brown, curly hair…and brown eyes. He had brown eyes…and they looked at her and he and they (his brown eyes) smiled—generously, unselfconsciously, a smile that was an offering to her, to her beauty and her amused look. She could not remember any man looking at her like that, so openly, so unguardedly, with frank interest but no hint of a leer, no insinuation._

 _Sarah abruptly found herself blushing—something that she_ did not do _. She looked away from him—something that she did not do either, except when calculated choice guided her to do it. She could feel his look remain on her through a large part of his introduction, an introduction that lasted a long time, since whatever exactly his troubles, Chuck Bartowski was a once and possibly future academic superstar. She studied the floor in front of her until the introduction was finished. When she looked up, he had sat down._

 _Later, Sarah had been talking to a colleague from Foreign Languages, drinking some of the usual cheap champagne often poured at these never-ending academic functions. Her colleague was translating medieval love poetry and was talking enthusiastically about her latest obsession when Sarah felt a gentle touch on her elbow. She gave a start and twisted so fast it was almost impossible to see it happen. She had managed to shift her grip on her champagne flute so that she could use it as a weapon. But what—who—confronted her was Chuck Bartowski, smiling his easy smile and allowing her the first close look at—her first plunge into—his brown eyes._

 _"I'm sorry to startle you. I wanted to say_ hello _but I don't know your name. I do now know that you must have spent some time learning a martial art because that response wasn't just amazingly fast, I fear it might have ended with me_ ending _—death by flute, not well-tempered and not at concert house." He laughed_. _Musically and engagingly, damn him._

 _"I'm sorry to have…overreacted. I don't like to be surprised." She regretted her tone as soon as she said the words: flinty, cold, alienating._

 _Chuck backed up a literal and metaphorical step. "I can tell. I do apologize. I was just…eager."_

 _Now it was Sarah who stepped back. "'Eager'? You were eager to surprise me?"_

 _"No, no, I was eager to meet you. I'm new. I'm a new guy in computer science."_

 _"No, you're_ the _new guy in computer science,_ the _new guy on the faculty."_

 _Chuck frowned and a little of the openness in his eyes disappeared. "Um, well, I'm glad to be here and I am eager…" he smirked at his own unintended repetition of that word, "…to get started at Commonwealth. I'll be sure not to surprise you in the future. Maybe, like the mice, you could bell the cat?" He laughed again, gently._

 _"Oh, so I'm the mouse and you're the cat?" Her tone again, but aggressive and threatening this time._

 _He stepped back again, opening a now-noticeable gap between them, literally and metaphorically. "No, no, really, I didn't mean it that way. I was just thinking in the image of the belled cat, thinking of that Marianne Moore poem in her translation of La Fontaine? No? I wasn't….uh…distributing the image across the two of us, really, not in any serious way. I mean—now that I think about it—if we are distributing it seriously, you would definitely be the cat and I would be the mouse."_

 _Sarah looked at him, growing more annoyed against her will, but she couldn't tell if she was annoyed with Chuck or with herself_ , _or with both of them._

 _"Like that makes it better?" Her question was absolutely flat._

 _"I was hoping to be introduced to you too, but I get the feeling I'm losing a game I didn't know I was playing and did not mean to play. So, I'm going to resign; consider my king toppled. I resign. Good game. Maybe I'll see you around." His tone was itself resigned, hurt but not huffy._

 _He walked away, facing her for a few steps before he turned around and walked into the thinning crowd. Sarah held onto her champagne flute with a grip that began to ache. Her colleague looked at her askance._

 _"Wow, Sarah. What was that about? He seems like a nice guy. You seemed like you were about to kill him."_

 _Sarah didn't answer for a while. She searched the room again for Chuck. Maybe she could catch up with him? But why? And what would she say? Why had she acted like that? She had faced threats before, long odds. Why had a look and touch unhinged her? Her low-grade fear and her numbness were gone, replaced by an ache in her chest acuter by far than the ache in her fingers, still strangling the stem of the flute._

 _Sarah looked back to her colleague. She still had not answered. She had no answer, really, or none she was willing to contemplate. Finally, she spoke._

 _"I…just don't feel…well. I must be coming down with something, maybe it's the heat."_

Sarah told Carina the gist of this, but leaving out any real indication of her deeper thoughts or feelings. She explained it, to the extent that she did, in the same way she explained it to her colleague. Carina rolled her eyes.

"The hell you were sick, Sarah. You haven't been sick once since you got here. Chuckles touched you, girl, he sure did; he touched you and cut you to the quick and you've never been touched like that before. Can't you admit that to me, even if you can't to yourself? What's the problem with responding to a man's touch? I think you've been waiting to be touched like that for a long time."

"The problem is I don't respond unless I choose to respond. And I've chosen not to choose to respond. Look, I know this doesn't make sense to you, but I have made a choice. I am alone and I need to be alone."

Carina's gaze was one of frank disbelief. But whether she disbelieved that Sarah had made that choice or disbelieved that she could keep it, she did not say. She let the topic drop.

}o{

Chuck saw the blonde hair from the moment he entered the Union. His initial mental decision was to go the other way, but his feet failed to get the message. They were taking him straight toward her. He had found out her name: _Sarah_. He did finally get his feet to slow down and to swing in a path around her table. He could see that she was talking with someone, a woman with red hair. He didn't want to startle or surprise Sarah again. She had a fork in her hand, after all. He'd like the chance to meet her unarmed, but it didn't seem likely to happen. The red-haired woman watched him circle the table. Her features had been illegible before, neutral—but now she had begun to grin an anticipatory grin. As he got to the other side of the table, Sarah saw him. But that had been the point: he wanted to be sure she saw him coming this time.

She saw him coming alright. She jerked up in her chair as if it was electrified. That was not good. He stopped mid-step, like a cartoon character. But he could neither move nor turn in such a position, so, after a moment's ludicrous hesitation, he had to complete the step, a step toward her. She reacted by sweeping her lunch things into her bag and standing. She was gone before he could take another step or head in another direction. He stood in his awkward pose, as if he were frozen in stride. Sarah's blonde hair headed toward the door of the Union. The red-haired woman hissed his name: "Chuck, you moron. Catch her!"

Chuck wondered how the red-haired woman knew him well enough to call him a moron, but he thought that, given the situation, she was right, even if unduly familiar. He started after Sarah's retreating hair as quickly as he could on his long legs without actually breaking into a run.

Sarah was at the door and was reaching for it. She opened it and headed out. Chuck was catching up, but he was afraid to call her name to stop her and afraid to touch her when he caught up with her. Still trying to decide what he would do when he reached the point of no return, he ran headlong into John Casey.

Chuck bounced off John like a ball off a wall.

"Good Lord, Chuck. Watch it! How could you have missed me?" John glanced in the direction Chuck was heading and saw Sarah moving quickly off in the distance. "Oh."

"Well, she's worth chasing, I give you that. She's a beautiful woman: long legs and brains—but a woman like that, if she's alone, there must be _a story_. It can't be by choice. Either she's broken or she breaks anyone who's interested. I can tell you this much," John was still staring at Sarah as she disappeared, "she's had an interesting path to Commonwealth. I'm virtually certain that woman has not always been a professor…A _professional_ , maybe, but not a professor."

With that dark comment, John bent down and offered Chuck a hand. Chuck had listened to this little speech while seated on his ass after his ricochet from Casey. He looked past Casey, but Sarah had disappeared, vanished. She must have gone into one of the buildings across the quad. Chuck knew which building housed Foreign Languages. But now that he had a moment to think about it, he decided that it would be foolish to follow a woman who'd gone to great lengths—great actual, spatial lengths—to make it obvious that she wanted nothing to do with him.

}o{

Casey watched as Chuck dusted himself off and left. Casey had met Chuck during Chuck's first day on campus. Commonwealth had gone to considerable expense to supply Chuck with state-of-the-art computers and other equipment. Casey was the head of security on campus. He met with Chuck the first day about how best to keep the lab secure, on the arrangements that would work best with Chuck's research schedule.

Casey knew that Chuck took a quick liking to him even if the feeling failed to be mutual. Not that Casey disliked Chuck. He just wasn't sure yet what to make of him. He'd been prepared for an academic prima donna, all stuffy and name-dropping and self-satisfied. Instead, he met a man who seemed _normal_. That was abnormal for most academics. About the only thing at all abnormal about Chuck Bartowski—was a yoke of sadness he wore when he thought no one else was watching. There was a broken dream weighing on the man's shoulders, but he bore the burden of it lightly, even invisibly, when he thought others were watching him. Casey thought he might come to like Chuck—over time. Casey was never one to warm up to folks too quickly. He'd seen too much to put stock in first impressions...

...Actually, now that he thought about it, maybe he did like the kid.

}o{

Sarah reached her office and quickly unlocked it. She slipped inside and shut the door, pressing the button to relock it. She leaned heavily against it. She was feeling something akin to terror. It was something _akin_ to terror—but she was not terrified. She was excited, tremendously excited. Seeing Chuck had set her heart racing immediately. It had been racing before she stood and started her long near-sprint to her office.

She had never reacted to a man like this, not even to Bryce. But she didn't need to think about Bryce, any more than she needed to be breathing hard in response to the mere thought of being touched again—even looked at again—by Chuck Bartowski.

She had a problem to face.

Commonwealth was not a large college, not a large campus. Almost everyone taught classes or held office hours almost every weekday. The chances of her running into Chuck were quite high unless she took extraordinary precautions. She could do that kind of thing; she knew how to do it. She had already looked him up in the campus directory once or twice or…a few times. She knew his teaching schedule had him teaching in the class period before her first class and again in the class period before her second class.

He was teaching in a different building, on the far corner of the quad. So, unless she went to the Union before her classes or after her classes, she likely would not run into him. But the Union was part of her before- and after-class routine. She got coffee there in the morning, and, like today, ate her lunch there in the early afternoon. She could stop at the chain coffee shop off-campus, but she liked the one in the Union.

The man who ran it, Morgan, was a goof, but the kind of goof whose company she'd come to enjoy since she changed jobs. She looked forward to talking to him or his wife, Alex, each morning. It was part of her day, a part that made her day better.

That was the thing. Her days at Commonwealth, while not perfect, were always better than her days had been before. Despite the numbness. Real people now populated her days. People like Morgan and Alex, who liked her and thought of her as a part of their days the way she thought of them as part of hers. She had gone so many years with no one in her life like that, not even in minor roles. She had gone years with no routines except the ones she depended on to stay alive. But they were not the kinds of routines that she wanted to keep, despite the fact that she still found it difficult not to fall into them.

Yes, the numbness was not great. But it was mostly self-directed. _She felt nothing in particular about herself_ , _her past or present or future._ She liked Morgan and Alex, and her ten minutes with them every morning thawed her numbness, brought her briefly out of her self-imposed cryogenic state.

Was she willing to give up being briefly heart-warmed by them each day to avoid a man who made her entire being butterfly and dance? Put that way, it sounded crazy, like she was willing to give up a good thing to keep from adding something better. But that better something was a something she had chosen not to have, long before Chuck Bartowski incarnated it right in front of her at a new faculty party. She might be suffering from self-numbness, but that was not going to make her break the solemn promises she had made to herself.

She would have to buy her coffee off-campus for a while until she could be sure what Chuck's morning habits were. If he stayed away from the Union, she could go back to her cherished routine. If not, she'd make do. Maybe she could send a note to Morgan and Alex telling them her writing schedule had changed and that she wouldn't be by in the mornings this semester. She didn't want to just vanish on them. She'd been just vanishing on people for nearly fifteen years—hell, for most of her life. She wanted to quit vanishing. She wanted to stay, to be substantial. She wanted to cast a shadow, not step into the shadows. She had hung up her cloak and locked away her dagger.


	2. Chapter 2: Romeo, Romeo

**A/N** Folks seem interested, so I will post the story. I am finishing the final chapter. Here is Chapter 2. Thanks for all the responses. I haven't had a chance to get back to everyone, but I will try to do that.

More of our quiet college caper.

Thanks to michaelfmx for the beta work. He is the alpha beta.

Don't own Chuck.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Friday, September 1, 7 pm: The Beginning of Labor Day Weekend

Main Campus, Commonwealth College

* * *

CHAPTER 2 Romeo, Romeo

* * *

Chuck finished up in the lab. He picked up his laptop bag and left, locking up behind him.

He was working on a new cryptographic system, one that could decrypt virtually any cipher—and in a jiffy. _A good word, 'jiffy'_. It could also encrypt at a level of sophistication that only the system itself could decrypt. Given the nature of the project and the interest governments, including the US government, would take in it, Chuck had kept the project to himself—at least at the macro-level.

He had assigned pieces of it to the graduate students and undergraduate students who were helping him with his research, but he never gave any of them any sense of what they were working on being a piece of a larger project, or even explained why, in particular, the piece they were working on was worth the effort. That was one advantage of his (admittedly now soiled) reputation as a 'genius'. No one expected to understand him or his work, not really. The project was all but done. Not all the hardware was in place, but Chuck knew essentially how it would work and how the final pieces of hardware needed to be designed.

Chuck had taken the further precaution of not committing anything about the project to paper or to computer files. He kept it all in his head. He'd been thinking about it for years. The inwards of Chuck Bartowski's head were vast and complicated. He could picture the project as an intricate, three-dimensional shape, and could see it how the shape needed to be filled in and connected. He was at that stage of the project where all that was left was the final tinkering. The big conceptual push had been made.

One reason he took the offer from Commonwealth was that they were willing to let him pursue his research in a hands-off way, and in particular were willing to foot the bill for the equipment he needed. Commonwealth was a Florida school on the way up. It was still technically a four-year liberal arts college, but it was functioning more and more as a full-scale research university. It was a university in all but name—and getting that name was the plan. Hiring Chuck had been part of that plan. Even with his troubled academic past, his name was synonymous with _serious research_. It didn't hurt that he was also photogenic and young: he was intended to become the public face of Commonwealth. Or, again, that was part of the plan. Commonwealth was gambling that Chuck's troubles were over and that he would soon produce splashy research and pave the way for the school to attain its university status.

Chuck knew that the research he was about to complete could not itself be flashy. It would have to be kept top secret: for now, even from the US government. He was not going to hand it over to just anyone. It would in effect rewrite the balance of power in the keeping of secrets, giving the government who controlled it a huge advantage over every other government. He wasn't going to give it over to the US government until he knew something about who would be using it and how it would be used. He was also going to have to make clear to the government certain crucial features he had built into the project that would limit their ability to exploit it.

No, it would not itself be flashy. But peripherals he had designed for it would be and could be treated as modular, separated out from the larger project and turned to their own uses. He _would_ make a splash for Commonwealth before all was said and done. He appreciated them taking a chance on him.

Chuck normally headed home after he finished up his research for the day, but he felt restless. Years of work had come to an end, even though the project was not yet physically realized. But oddly enough, that was not the source of his restlessness. He had known it was all but done. The source of his restlessness was Sarah.

Every day he came to campus he hoped to see Sarah. But he never did. It was like she'd become a ghost. It was frustrating—but maybe it was for the best. So much of Chuck's troubled past was wrapped up in a woman. He didn't need to make that sort of mistake again. But he had really and truly begun to get over Janet. It had taken a while. Admittedly, he sank into a funk— _yes, call it a 'funk'_ —that lasted an embarrassingly long time. But he had climbed back out. Maybe he wasn't all he had been before her, or especially when he was with her, but he was better. He felt like himself—more than he had in years.

But the mere sight of Sarah sped that change. He went from being uninterested in seeing anyone, dating anyone, to wholly enamored in a nanosecond. He was like Romeo seeing Juliet for the first time. "She doth teach the torches to burn bright!"

He laughed at himself out loud. That was rom-com craziness, Shakespearean magic. "This lanthorn doth the horned moon present." No, this was real life. And anyway, in the rom-com, he and Sarah would have _met cute_ : she wouldn't have snarled at him and made threatening gestures with a champagne flute, or sprinted from a conversation with him the next time she saw him. No, if this were a rom-com, its writer had no idea how to handle the conventions.

Chuck's restless feet took him, he realized as he broke off his reflections, to Sarah's building. _No harm in looking, really, right_? _So said the man who was about to stare into the sun_. He went inside. The bottom floor had a study lounge and a few students were there, each sitting looking at a computer or a phone. Except for a couple in the corner, a tall, thin young woman and a red-haired young man who were sitting across from each other and actually talking, no electronics in sight. Chuck sometimes wondered if students knew what human faces unframed by gadgets actually looked like. Of course, he was partly to blame for their umbilical cordage to the gadgets: he'd designed much of what made the best gadgets do what they did. He'd intended to for the gadgets to make their lives better—not to become their lives. Chuck himself owned a cell phone (he had built it) but he left it off unless he had to make a call or expected an important call. There was nothing inherently wrong with technology (if there was, Chuck would be a villain), except that it offered scope to the strange need so many had to enslave themselves to something. _Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains—_ right, Rousseau, right, but all too often chains of his own infernal forging.

Chuck got on the elevator. He knew Sarah's office number, 3232. He didn't forget numbers. Other things sometimes, yes, but not numbers. The elevator counted the floors for him in a weird robotic voice. Chuck did not really pay any attention; he was reading the leaflets taped to the walls of the elevator, announcing new classes, clubs, guitars for sale. He got off on the third floor. He walked to the 200 Quadrant, knowing Sarah's office must be nearby. It was: just a few doors down the hall on the right. He stopped in front of the closed door.

Unlike many of the doors that were decorated with nameplates or with cartoons or political flyers or learned quotations, hers was unadorned. A small index card was taped to the door just below eye-level (although Chuck had to bend to read it) had her name written on it in careful print. Beneath her name, the same hand had supplied her office hours as well as the names and times and room numbers of her classes. Nothing else was there. Nothing that might indicate anything about the books she read, about her sense of her vocation or political leanings, even about her sense of humor. The door was shut in every sense.

Except that now it wasn't. Sarah had just opened it and was looking in surprise at Chuck. He was still bent over as he had been when he was reading the card, but this now meant that he was bent over and (effectively) looking at her chest. He stood at the same time that she gasped.

"Chuck!"

Chuck's first reaction was a mental fist pump: she remembered him. But she had run from him—that she knew who he was sort of seemed required by that, so it should not have surprised him that she remembered him.

"Sarah! Ah, um, hi! I was just out walking on campus, clearing my head—long research day—and I, um, I thought I would walk through some of the buildings since I'm new here and…"

"And you just happened to find my office and to be staring at…the card on my door?"

"Well…something like that, yeah."

Chuck could see that Sarah felt trapped. She couldn't really get out of the office given where he was standing. Chuck didn't want her to feel trapped, but he also didn't want to chase her. He had the strongest feeling that he would never catch her. So, he compromised. He backed up a step (the dance he now felt he would keep dancing with her), far enough for her to step out of her office and leave if she chose. But near enough for her to have to pass quite close to him if she did choose that. She seemed to understand the logic of their spatial positions immediately. She didn't move. She stayed where she was.

"Is there something I can do for you, Dr. Bartowski?"

Chuck realized she hadn't exactly stayed where she was. Using his title was her stepping backward. That she used it hurt Chuck's feelings more than it should have, given that they barely knew each other.

"Um, no, Sarah. May I call you 'Sarah'?"

"You already have twice, I think. Might as well go on."

"Thanks, call me Chuck, please."

The way she looked at him promised nothing. She just stood there, eyeing him. He noticed her color rising, however.

"Well, Chuck, as my mom would say, _move your ass_. I have places to go."

"Your mom is a crafter of phrases, I see."

She stalled for a moment. He could see she was fighting laughter. She lost—she laughed. "Yes, Mom rarely indulges in cliché, one of my favorite things about her, the freshness of her verbal imagination."

Chuck fell, fell for her, fell for good at that. Forget Janet. Forget all that crap in the past. This was a woman. This was _the_ woman.

That woman stepped out of her office, pulled the door closed behind her and squeezed past Chuck in the blink of his smitten eye. The next thing he knew, he was chasing her…again. She seemed determined not to break her purposeful stride or to acknowledge that he was behind her. He reached out to touch her shoulder and…

"Chuck Bartowski!" He stopped. He looked behind him. John Casey was standing at the other end of the hall, near the stairwell door. He looked alarmed—or as close to alarmed as Casey could get. "I saw you come in here from across the quad. There's an alarm going off in your lab. We should get over there."

Chuck then recognized that Sarah had stopped too. He glanced at her and she glanced at him. She seemed transformed to him, galvanized; she had instantaneously become something…she had once been. A compressed energy radiated from her. She was focused from head to toe.

"Well, C'mon!" Casey shouted this as he swung open the stairwell door. Chuck kept his gaze fixed on Sarah—but it had become a question. She started past him toward Casey.

"Well, Chuck, do as the man says, c'mon." He followed her quickly to the stairwell and the three of them descended.

}o{

Sarah was sitting in her office. She'd been writing. But it was Friday night, the beginning of Labor Day weekend, and she was feeling restive. The words were coming, but only slowly, one at a damn time, and after much effort. She knew that her trouble was her divided mind. About half of it was on the manuscript. The other half-plus was on Chuck. Still. She kept replaying her insane dash out of the Union. Why had she run? She ran from nothing. Well, she knew when to cut her loses and…strategically retreat. But that had not been a strategic retreat: that was a full-on rout. If she'd been a soldier, it would have been the equivalent of dropping her rifle, dumping her ammo and rabbiting as far and as fast from the battle line as possible. Sarah Walker did not rabbit. Not unless Chuck Bartowski smiled at her. Then she rabbited like one of those nervous bunnies in _Watership Down_.

She marveled again at the completeness and depth and strength of her reaction to a man she barely knew. She felt like Romeo upon first seeing Juliet—"He doth teach the torches to burn bright!" When he was near her, he was all she could see. It was like her senses, all of them, contracted to one object: Chuck. And then her senses began working overtime. But she had no desire to be the leading man in her own little Shakespearean tragedy. Chuck was…beautiful ("I ne'er saw true beauty til…"). He literally made her knees tremble. But that was all the more reason to stick to her plan, so far successful, of avoiding all contact with him.

Unfortunately, her imagination was making contact with him, repetitious, increasingly fast, rhythmic contact with him. She was imagining…she was imagining making _vigorous_ contact…with him. No wonder it was hard for the words to come. She was getting fidgety in her chair.

She stood up and shut down her computer. Enough was enough. If she went on like this, she wouldn't be fit for any company, and she'd told Carina that she might meet Carina and her date (what was his name again?) for a quick drink before she went home. Carina was strange—but she was watching out for Sarah. She'd commented more than once that she hated how alone Sarah was.

She grabbed her bag and opened her door. And to her shock, there was Chuck Bartowski, bent over, examining her…chest? No, she realized, he had been reading the card on her door. But having his gaze land where it landed, given her imagination's exertions just a moment before, made her pulse race. She gasped.

Chuck stood up straight. Before she knew what she was doing, Sarah exclaimed: "Chuck!"

He said her name in response. She wanted to high-five someone. He knew her name. But of course, he did. He was standing at her office door, reading the card on the door. He obviously wasn't there by mistake.

He seemed to have reacted as strongly to seeing her as she had to him. He launched into an explanation of why he was there, an explanation that made it sound like he was there by accident. But the explanation was lame, and he knew it.

She poked at the explanation and he conceded its lameness, although not in so many words. She was feeling…things. She was feeling things all over. She wanted to run again, but he was blocking the door. She saw him thinking. He took a step back. He was giving her room to run but not so much that running would be easy. She'd almost have to brush against him to get out of her office and close the door. She considered how much space she had and how she might use it. He was waiting for some reaction from her.

She retreated by saying, "Is there something I can do for you, Dr. Bartowski?"

 _God, I sound like a bitch when I talk to him_. He's done nothing to deserve it except make me feel…really, really _not-numb_. She could see hurt in his eyes and she felt awful.

He asked if he could use her name. Bitchy again, she noted that he had been and might as well continue. She suddenly felt ashamed, ashamed and—she might as well admit it—aroused. She colored and she could feel it enough to know it was noticeable.

She wanted to ask him out for a drink. She wanted to ask him to take her home. She wanted to take him to bed. Because of all that, she told him to move so she could leave. _Move your ass_? Did she just say that and attribute it to her mother? She was in so much trouble.

And then his response—a carefully crafted phrase about phrase-crafting. She was officially done. If he touched her, she would surrender, surrender completely, lay down her arms and take him in her arms.

She managed to reply in kind and saw a slow burn register in his eyes. That only made her general…discomfort…worse. She took advantage of his strong reaction to slip past him and into the hallway. She was trying to get to the elevator. If she could get there without him stopping her—in particular, without him touching her, she would escape. Live to fight against him, and her thoughts' insistent gravitation toward him, for another day. Four more steps. Three more steps. Two…

"Chuck Bartowski!" Sarah knew that was not her voice and it was not Chuck's. She heard Chuck turn; he had been right behind her. She turned too. It was the security guy, Casey. She knew him from brief meetings in the Union coffee shop. Casey explained quickly that alarms were going off in Chuck's lab.

Involuntarily, without realizing it, Sarah immediately slipped back into her cloak-and-dagger mindset. She was ready for action. She stepped past Chuck and headed toward Casey, calling for Chuck to follow. He did, and they were soon running down the stairs.

}o{

Outside the building—in the main parking lot to which a jogging Casey led them—was an old, white Toyota Land Cruiser parked beside a brand-new, black Mazda MX5 Miata. Chuck pointed at the first. "We can take my car!"

Sarah pointed at the second and, simultaneously, said: "We can't take my car!"

Casey growled. A campus security car was off to the side, parked next to a stand of bushes that obscured it from view. "We'll take my car!"

They jumped in. Chuck got in the back, leaving the front seat for Sarah. Casey saw her notice this but she didn't take the time to consider it. She slid in. Casey did too. Casey started the car while looking at her. "You just along for the ride?"

Sarah shrugged at him. Casey drove them through the maze of small roads and parking lots that cut up the campus. In just a couple of minutes, they were at Chuck's lab. The alarm must have been silenced. An alert was flashing where all could see it on the laptop installed in the security car. But there was no sound coming from the building. Casey opened the glove compartment and took out a sidearm. He watched Sarah as she watched him check his weapon. Her eyes were ahead of him at each step. Yep, a professional of some kind. Not just an egghead. Maybe FBI?

Then he remembered Antonio, a security officer who worked for him, mentioning last year that the attractive new Foreign Languages prof spoke Italian fluently, as well as he. Antonio was from Rome, grew up there, before he married an American woman, a nurse, and moved with her to Florida. If Walker knew the language that well, then maybe she had done something less…domestic…than the FBI.

Then it hit Casey between the eyes. She was had been a _spook_. Maybe she still was a spook.

When he was in the Marines, he had gone on a couple of black ops missions run by CIA agents. There was something about Walker that clicked when he thought of her in that context. He could imagine her running one of those missions, no problem. It was there in the way she looked around her constantly, in the way she held herself, the feeling that she was coiled. A _goddamn_ spook—former spook?—on campus. And she was now mixing herself up in Chuck's…affairs. Alarm bells went off in Casey's head for _Chuck's_ sake, not for Chuck's _lab's_ sake. But Casey had no time now to worry about it. She was there, and he needed to get into the lab and figure out what was going on.

Casey got out of the car. He stayed close to it for a moment, standing inside the open door, and took a long look around. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Well, nothing other than one of the outer doors of Chuck's lab standing about two inches open. Walker got out of the car after a moment, mirroring Casey's position inside her own door. He saw her look back at Chuck, who Casey heard pull on the latch of the passenger-side rear door. Casey leaned down and growled. "Stay in the car, Chuck."

When Casey stood back up, he could see a look of agreement and approval. She wanted Chuck to stay in the car too. That told Casey a lot. He knew this wasn't just her trying to keep a civilian out of harm's way. She was frightened for Chuck's sake. The alarm bells in Casey's head switched back off, at least temporarily.

Chuck slumped back in the seat after Casey's growled warning. Casey closed his door quietly, as did Walker.

Casey walked over to the open door, his gun out but held down close to his side. Walker fell in behind him, exactly as she should have. Yep, professional all right. Huh. There was a blonde spook on the faculty. There was a break-in in the new genius' computer lab. Commonwealth had suddenly become much more to Casey's liking, even if he still had reservations about the blonde and about what it all meant. It seemed hard to believe her being at Commonwealth was a mere coincidence. But she had been there a year before Chuck showed up, months before the process began that ended with Chuck being hired. She certainly had not so far gone out of her way to attract—seduce?—Chuck. Unless she was the great master of the really-hard-to-get strategy—maybe?—she had not done anything to attach herself to Chuck. But why had she mixed herself up in this? She had to know that she was doing something that could reveal a past—a present?—she had been so far careful to conceal in her brief time at the school. Again, the math seemed to favor the conclusion that she had no bad intentions where Chuck was concerned. Maybe Casey should just accept the dumb luck of it. Chuck happened to be talking to her at the crucial moment. At least Casey had help. There was never more than one security officer on duty at a time. He had no wish to call the town police, not yet, anyway. Paperwork nightmare.

}o{

Sarah was cursing herself as Casey started the car. He had watched her watch him check his gun. She should have anticipated that. But her knowing witness to what he did had given her away. Her witness had not given him specifics, but it had given him generalities. He knew she knew guns and was not intimidated by them, had used them herself. She had seen Casey's file before she started at Commonwealth. Ex-Marine. He was a good man in a fight. Marksman. He had done some black ops works. The NSA had approached him with an offer to become an agent a couple of times. He had turned them down flat. He ended up at Commonwealth after retiring, when he realized that fishing and hunting, while all he hoped, could not fill his days. He needed a job, something to care about and protect; he took the job as head of security at Commonwealth.

They got to Chuck's lab. Sarah immediately saw one of the lab doors ajar. Something was going on. Casey got out and studied the surroundings. Sarah joined him. She saw nothing to draw her attention but the door. She heard Chuck start to get out of the car. Before she could warn Chuck not to do so, Casey growled for him to stay in the car. Sarah felt her own anxiety lessen a bit. She realized that her reason for being here was the man in the back seat of the campus security car. Try as she might, her thoughts and now her actions kept finding their way to Chuck. She'd worry about that more once this situation was under control.

}o{

Casey moved to the door, standing with his back to it but careful not to touch it. It was a heavy metal door with no window. He listened carefully but couldn't hear anything. He moved to go through the door, and as he pushed it open with one hand far enough to step inside, Walker took up his old position, standing with her back to the door. She had produced a gun—presumably from her bag. Huh. She nodded at Casey. He went through the door and stepped into the darkened lab. Walker spun quickly into place behind him, covering his entrance. Casey's eyes adjusted, although far less speedily than in his younger days. He relied as much as he could on his ears. He still heard nothing that seemed problematic. He saw nothing either. There were lots of little lights here and there, blinking in patterns—but none of them seemed threatening.

"Casey!" Walker hissed his name. He turned. She was standing inside the door now, her gun in one hand but her other hand on the light switch. Casey could tell that she could see him. He braced himself and nodded to her, his gun trained on the half of the room opposite hers. She flipped the switch. Casey blinked a few times in the light. He could see no one. He turned to Walker. She shrugged. They stood there for a while with their guns out, and then at almost the same moment, Casey put his into the back of his trousers and she mimicked his motion. A beat after that, Chuck came walking into the lab.

"Saw the light."

"You couldn't have gotten in here this fast if you'd stayed in the car," Walker said.

}o{

Sarah sounded bitchy yet again, cold and flinty. Why couldn't she manage to speak to him and not sound as if she hated him? She could see her tone's impact in Chuck's eyes. But it was his turn to shrug. "I couldn't leave you guys alone in here."

Chuck looked at her for a long, hard moment. He was re-evaluating her. Damn. He really was scary smart, and not just with computers. She could tell he knew her story was even more complicated than he had thought.

They took a few minutes to look around. Everything seemed to be in place. One computer, though, had been tampered with. When Chuck got on it, he was able to find that someone had tried several times to enter the password required to get into the network he had created for all of the computers in his lab—as well as his computers at home. Each of the four attempts had failed. Chuck was able to call up a program that recorded the keystrokes.

The attempts had been clumsy, none near the mark. They were worrisome in certain respects, because each was a word or name that was implicated in Chuck's past, or so he said, although, with one exception, the four words seemed ridiculous: 'hound', 'bay horse, 'turtle dove', 'Janet'. The last one was the one that made an impression on Sarah. She recalled that one of the articles she had read online about Chuck mentioned him as engaged to a woman, Janet. An obvious possible password, although why anyone would think that one of the best computer scientists on the planet would use his wife-to-be's name as his password escaped her. Or it did until she remembered that her password on her campus computer was 'password'. And she had the history she had… so anything was possible.

Sarah listened as Casey declared the incident done. He retrieved a clipboard from his car and filled out a form. Chuck signed it. He told Chuck that he would reset the alarm and change the code. He would call Chuck and give it to him so that he could get into the lab over the weekend if he wanted to work. He offered to take both of them to their cars.

No one spoke while Casey backtracked and dropped them off. His goodnight to them both was terse but not unfriendly. He made pointed eye contact with Sarah as she undid her seatbelt. He wanted her to know that he knew…something. But his gaze shifted at the last moment and he looked from her to Chuck: a warning. He liked Chuck, she could tell. He did not mistrust her, but he was not yet willing to trust her. She would have to talk to him later. She only nodded.

}o[

Sarah sighed. Chuck got out of the back of the car and opened the passenger door for Sarah. She smirked at him as she got out. "Maybe I should have belled the cat. I would've known not to open my door to you, Chuck." He just looked at her.

He had seen her past tonight. She had revealed it to their present. That was another reason why they could have no future.

Except, damn him, he made her feel…hopeful.


	3. Chapter 3: Muddy Waters

**A/N** More of our rom-spy-dramedy. A longish chapter. Thanks so much for reading and responding. I have been finishing the story (and am now done with it except for some revisions) and so have been a little slower than usual to respond to reviews and PMs, but I am nearly caught up. Drop me a line.

Thanks to michaelfmx for his continued, excellent beta work. All mistakes are mine.

Don't own Chuck. No money made.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Later Friday Night, Sept. 1, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Main Campus, Commonwealth College

* * *

CHAPTER 3 Muddy Waters

* * *

Casey drove away, leaving Sarah standing in the parking lot with Chuck. Chuck glanced at her and then at the Miata.

"Nice car." She smiled and laughed against her will. She did like the car, although she had gotten rid of the Porsche she loved before she bought it. Driving a Porsche on an Assistant Professor's salary would have drawn unnecessary attention. The Mazda drew some, but it was within the bounds of possibility, especially when her story about herself included a wealthy father.

But she also smiled because it was patient and kind, a dodge on Chuck's part. He was obviously full of questions—he had been before she had joined him and Casey to check on the lab. Now, he had even more. He wasn't going to ask them, however. He instead commented on her car. Tired of talking to him as she had been so far, she turned to stare carefully at his Land Rover. They were closer to it than to her car. She could see it well in the pool of light from the light pole. It was old and white—but in good repair, carefully maintained. She spoke, careful to keep laughter in her voice.

"So—this is what computer geniuses drive these days? Seems a bit…well… _utility_ for a man with a Tron poster on his wall."

He gaped at her. "How'd you know? And I'm no genius."

She laughed silently. "Educated guess." She paused. "Good shot, I guess: C4!"

For a moment he looked at her like she was talking about the explosive—but then he understood.

He grinned at her. "You sank my battleship." He deliberately sounded defeated, even as he kept the grin on his face.

"The Land Cruiser belonged to my dad. He left it to me when he died, and it's a tank. I plan to replace it when it fails. But it just keeps running and running and running."

She knew she needed to get away from him. The urge to walk up to him and touch him, to invite him to touch her, had returned in full force. She had to resist it. She had promises to keep, promises she had made to herself. She was not going to open herself up to this sort of pain again. She knew in her bones how much it was possible to hurt. And she'd never reacted to anyone as she did to Chuck. If she opened herself to him and he…failed her…she'd never recover from it.

Chuck was waiting for her reaction; he was poised to walk to her. She had spoken to him without unkindness. Finally. That would have to be enough. She turned her gaze from him and looked into her bag for her keys. As was true earlier when she was walking to the elevator, she knew she was in a precarious position. She needed to be in her car and gone before he closed the distance between them, as he seemed about to do.

She grabbed her keys from the bottom of her bag. When she looked back up, she looked past Chuck to a black SUV that she noticed had just turned into the parking lot. The campus was nearly deserted. The students had gone home for the long weekend. Theirs were the only two cars in the empty lot. But the SUV had turned in and was now picking up speed, hurtling toward them. Sarah stepped to Chuck—he had already taken a step toward her—and she pulled him to her. "Trouble, Chuck!" She punched the button on her key fob at the same time and heard her car doors unlock. She shoved Chuck. "Run!" They ran. "Get in my car!"

He ran around the front of her car and opened the passenger door. He jumped in. She got in the driver's seat and started the car. The SUV came to a screeching halt behind her car. Luckily, there was no impediment to just going forward. She was able to throw the car into gear and punch the gas, heading out of the lot. As she picked up speed, she saw a second SUV enter the lot. The first had gotten rolling again too. The parking lot suddenly became a chess board. It was unclear whether the SUVs could force checkmate; it was also unclear how she and Chuck would escape.

There were two outlets from the parking lot. Each SUV was closer to one than Sarah was. It wasn't clear how she could get out—but it wasn't clear how the SUVs could capture her. She slammed on the brakes, stopping dead center in the parking lot. Each of the SUVs stopped near an exit. So far: pending stalemate.

"Sarah, look, they must want me. I thought no one knew about my research. But maybe someone found out. Let me get out and let them take me. There's no reason for you to get involved in this, no reason for you to get hurt."

She had been staring out of the driver's side window at one of the SUVs when he said that. She heard his seat belt unlatch. She reached over and grabbed his hand: she touched him.

She knew as soon as she did that what she feared had become fact. She felt his touch all the way from her hand to her wrist, up through her elbow and shoulder, down into and across her chest, until it settled deep inside her heart. _Chuck_.

"The hell you are. I'll get us out of this. Stay in the car, Chuck. And fasten your seatbelt again, it's about to become a bumpy night." Sarah punched the accelerator to the floor and the Mazda hurled forward. She wasn't driving toward either exit. The parking lot was bordered on the side they were heading toward by a standard sort of curb, about five or six inches high. Beyond the curb were a sidewalk and a long border of grass before there was another curb that formed the edge of one of the campus roads. The Mazda was low to the ground. If they impacted the curb head-on, it would likely sheer away the undercarriage of the car.

}o{

Chuck had no idea what Sarah was planning. As they picked up speed, he noticed that one of the SUVs gave up its outpost by the exit and came speeding toward them. Evidently, the driver believed Sarah's plan was to try to hurdle the curb—and the driver expected that maneuver to fail. Chuck's best guess was that the driver wanted to be in position in case they were able to get out of the car and take off on foot. Chuck braced for impact. It was a nice car. It was a shame.

}o{

At the last second, Sarah pushed in the clutch and spun the wheel with one hand, while she yanked up the emergency brake with the other. The little car went into a spin. She brought it out with practiced perfection, put it in gear and they shot past the SUV—out of the lot before the SUV had been able to slow down or turn around.

"Wow," Chuck yelled, his voice cracking. "That was amazing! You're amazing! How did you learn to do that? It was like a scene in a Jason Bourne movie. Wow!" Sarah didn't react to what he said. She was checking the rearview mirror. The SUVs were leaving the parking lot to give chase, but she knew she had gotten away.

Did they see her clearly enough to identify her? Did they get the Mazda's license plate number? She thought both unlikely. They couldn't go to Chuck's place, wherever that was. Could they go to hers? She thought they could go to her place but they shouldn't stay long. If she got him there, maybe she could call someone, turn him over, and maybe she could get back to living her new life. She didn't want to live her old one again, and it looked like she would have to do that if she were to stay with Chuck. She needed to know what was going on.

She ducked the Mazda into a dark strip mall parking lot, turning off her lights as she did so. She drove around the end of the strip of stores to the area in the back where deliveries were made and where dumpsters were stored. She pulled in between a couple of dumpsters, the small car completely obscured from view. She had been far enough ahead of the SUVs to be sure she had not been seen. She turned off her phone without looking at it and removed the SIM card. She told Chuck to do the same. He did.

She looked over at Chuck, but he was looking down at his hand. She had not realized it, but as soon as she had put down her phone and he had too, she had grabbed his hand again. He looked up from their joined hands at her. His face showed delight and confusion

"Um, Sarah, maybe we need to explain some things to each other." She sighed. Maybe so, maybe she should try to figure this out before she made a decision about where to go.

"Why would people break into your lab and try to abduct you, Chuck?"

"I guess because of my new research project." He explained it to her in general terms. It sounded like science fiction to her, but the break-in and the SUVs were no kind of fiction. She believed what he told her, even if she did not fully understand it.

"So there's no physical item they could steal? They need you, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, they'd need me. But they wouldn't get anything out of me. I wouldn't talk."

"Everybody talks…eventually, Chuck. They'd figure out a way to make you talk, and if they didn't, given that you do plan to give it to our government, then they'd just kill you."

She said it as if she were laying out mission parameters, detached and clinical. But Chuck had never heard the end of his life discussed in such a tone. He recoiled from her and jerked his hand from hers. She recoiled from that, both because she had again lost track of the fact that she was still holding his hand, and because of the sting of having him react to her as he had. What was her problem? Her heart was flip-flopping in her chest at the thrill of touching him, but she had just discussed him being killed the way she might discuss discarding a ballpoint pen that ran out of ink.

This— _this_ was one of the reasons she had gotten out. Life and death had started to seem like nothing more than mission parameters. Even her own life had come to seem like a mission parameter to her. She realized at that point that her alienation from ordinary human life was complete. Something had to be done or she would be dead or a complete burnout in another year or two. So she had gotten out. Quit the job and walked. She had arranged a return to civilian life.

She had struggled with the job and what it was doing to her before Bryce. After him, nothing seemed to matter except the mission. Now she was slipping back into that posture again, feeling that familiar low-grade fear, a fear not really for herself, but for the mission itself. But what was her mission now? And although the low-grade fear had returned, it was not the only feeling she was experiencing, not by a long shot. Whatever it was that touching Chuck had sent torpedoing from her fingers to her heart was there too. And not so low-grade. High-grade. But she couldn't express it or even think about it directly without admitting it was there, embracing it to some extent. She didn't want to do that. So she had spoken to Chuck again in a tone that really did not express what she was feeling, reveal the complexity of what she was feeling.

Chuck was looking at her still, his eyes dark with fear and consternation.

"Okay, so they either get what they want from me or they kill me—or, given what you've said and taking its implications seriously—they get what they want from me _and_ they kill me. I guess I knew when I started this project that it would put me in danger. It seemed worth it anyway. I thought maybe I could actually use my talent to make the world a better place instead of just using it to make shitloads of money. That I could do at any point. I just don't care about money."

Trying to remove some of the sting of her previous tone, previous words, Sarah smiled slightly. "I know, I've seen your car."

Chuck had not expected that response. He almost smiled. "How can you drive like you do? How did you know what to do to back up Casey? How do you know what people like those people in the SUVs will do?" The questions he had not asked before were beginning to tumble out now, all at once.

Instead of answering, Sarah pulled the car out from between the dumpsters. She kept her lights off until she had entered traffic. There was no sign of the SUVs. She was going to go to her place and figure out what to do. With Chuck. She was no longer particularly tempted to turn Chuck over. She was not sure she could.

"So, I see how this works. You get to ask me questions and I'm expected to answer them, but I ask, and I get silence in return. Again, I find myself playing a game with you whose rules I don't understand. C'mon, Sarah, say something…say anything! Please..."

She kept her eyes on the road. She could hear a new wariness in Chuck's tone, a new awareness of her. He knew she was not just a colleague he found attractive. She was…more. And he was finding that the _more_ frightened him. This was one reason why, in the past, she had never seriously dated someone who was not part of her world. At some level, she knew she was frightening. The life she led, the things she could do and sometimes had done—well, she didn't fit into ordinary human life, and she doubted any ordinary man could embrace her, the things she could do and sometimes had done. So, except for a couple of deliberately brief encounters, she had been involved only with spies. And she had been involved with few of them. She had been serious only with Bryce, really. She had thought she was in love with him. She had been a fool. Fooled.

}o{

In her early years in the CIA, she had been laser-focused on her career, on her missions. She had liked the job for a while, even loved it: she thought she was doing some good, doing what she thought of as applied politics, making the world a better place, one captured bad guy at a time, one foiled terrorist plot at a time. But as time went on, she became disillusioned. It wasn't that she wasn't doing good sometimes—she was—but it was becoming less clear when she was and when she wasn't. The politics she was applying no longer seemed like abstract ideals worthy of veneration, but like short-term agendas cooked up by long-term bureaucrats. She felt more and more like she was working _for the CIA_ , period. When she signed up, she thought she was _working for_ something like Goodness or Freedom, and doing it _by working at_ the CIA.

When she gave up on Goodness and Freedom, spying had started to seem like a job to her, not a calling. There was no visible honor in it. It was a dark, bloody, dangerous job, when it was not tedious. (It was mostly tedious.) The worthwhile goals of the job had become nebulous if they ever really existed at all. The only obvious goals were money or power— _someone's_ money or power. But by the time she figured that out, the job was all she knew. Even worse, she was good at it and had come to take pride in being good at it. She was so good at it that many believed she was the most talented agent the CIA had.

So, she had let her goals shift—from Goodness to being good at her job, the best. For a long time, she had been able to make do with that, living off her sense of accomplishment and pride, and making herself ignore any questions about what she was good at and whether being good at it was ultimately a bad thing.

All these thoughts raced through her mind as she put the Mazda through its paces. Chuck was still waiting. For a professor, he could keep his mouth shut. Why was he so patient with her? He had to be frightened in so many ways—for his work and for himself. And now he got to endure being frightened of her while she sat in silence and glared at the road ahead of her, checking the rearview now and then to make sure the SUVs had not found them.

She seemed to find it most natural around him to react in ways that confused or frightened or hurt him. She had long worried that she was broken, broken past repair. Wasn't she proving it tonight, hadn't she been proving it since he tried to talk to her at the new faculty party? What whole person reacted as she had?

She knew she needed to talk to Chuck, but her mouth wouldn't open. She glanced at him, and he was watching her. The headlights of a passing car momentarily lighted his brown eyes. She could see a complex of things in his eyes: fear, curiosity, thankfulness…affection. That last made her afraid of him—again. But the Mazda offered no room to run, and they were still about ten minutes from her house.

She forced her mouth into motion. She felt like her own ventriloquist's dummy, her hand somehow inserted into her own back.

"Look, Chuck, _you're_ the issue right now, not me. If you've kept this project in your head and you've told no one about it, then what happened tonight couldn't have happened, or could only have been some kind of mistake—a very weird kind of mistake. Are you absolutely sure you told no one about this? Not at all? Not even maybe in very general terms?"

Chuck sat in silence, thinking. He was quiet for a while. "You know, I've been carrying this project around in my head for a long time. I first had the idea when I was an undergrad at Stanford, but I couldn't quite see how to do it then. I don't recall ever saying anything to anyone about it. I knew even then that the idea could be dangerous. Plus, I don't like people who talk about things they don't know how to do as if they know how to do them. I tend not to share until there is really something to share. Anyway, I can't think of anyone I've talked about this with unless…Shit. But, no, wait, that can't be the source of this."

"What, Chuck?"

He went silent.

}o{

 _Chuck met Janet Sanders on a beautiful day. Of course. For a long time, in his memory, it had been the most beautiful day of his life. He had been teaching at Stanford for a while, but he started so young that he was still not much older than his students. Some of his graduate students were older than he was. He was sitting under a tree, peeling an orange. He'd finished the sandwich he had brought for his lunch. The day was so warm and his classes were finished, so he was just lolling about for a little while, enjoying being out of the lab—although he knew he would have to go back soon._

 _As he sat there, he noticed a young woman, probably his own age, so likely not an undergraduate, walking up the sidewalk that ran beside his tree. She had short dark hair. Her eyes were bright green, almost otherworldly_ _._ _The green was not the green you normally associated with eye color, it was brighter and, somehow, milkier. The color vaguely resembled the color of a matcha latte. Whatever the right description of the color was, her eyes lept out at Chuck, even though she was still quite a few steps away from him on the sidewalk. Perhaps it was because the green was foregrounded against her brown-black hair, but they seemed as if they were out in front of her, as if her eyes met him before she did. He shook his head; it all seemed dreamlike. But no, it was real, she was now about to pass him. Suddenly, she stopped and turned to look at him, her eyes spellbinding up close._

 _"Hi! Aren't you Chuck Bartowski?" She asked this in a confident, slightly teasing voice._

 _He hadn't known what to say to that, in part because he seemed to have misplaced English, lost his native tongue. He could find no words. She tilted her head and smiled. That was the end. That smile below those eyes was more than any mortal man could take. His world contracted to that little bit of grass and sidewalk and tree and her and him—and her eyes and smile: there was nothing else in existence. Eventually, he remembered that he did speak English—the other languages he knew were programming languages, and no one spoke those. Oh, and Klingon, but that seemed unlikely to help._

 _"Yes, I'm Chuck. Or I was. I mean, I will be. Yes, yes, was-am-will be. I'm all the Chuck tenses,_ _" He_ _immediately wanted to kick himself._

 _She laughed, a light, pleasant tinkling sound. "Are you really?"_

 _He just laughed. "Tense? Afraid so."_

 _She laughed and the tree seemed to sway in unison with her laugh,_ _its_ _leaves rustling as if it joined in._

 _"I'm Janet Sanders. I'm a grad student in Comp Lit. I know about you, your work. I hoped one day to run into you." She smiled again and Chuck felt himself levitate slightly. Up close, she looked like an Elven princess, a Tolkien character enfleshed._

 _They had chatted agreeably for a while before parting company. Chuck made sure he was positioned beneath the same tree at the same time the next day, but Janet never came._

 _The next day she did. She stopped to talk again. Chuck found his tongue and his courage at the same moment and asked her if she would like to have coffee with him. They walked to a nearby shop and sat talking until dark._

 _Janet was fascinating. Talkative, curious, funny. She was almost overwhelmingly articulate. She pushed Chuck in conversation, her mind playing with words, hers and his, constantly. Although Chuck tended to spend his time thinking in numbers and diagrams, he was deeply fond of language, his favorite writers were the greatest players with words, Shakespeare, Dickens, e.e. c_ _ummings, and so on. He loved conversations in which the words of the conversation became a part of the conversation. Janet's mind moved naturally and rapidly in just that way, and so they found out about each other that afternoon_ , _both by telling each other things and by playing with the words_ _of_ _they used to tell them._

 _They went out for the first time that weekend. A few weeks later, they were a couple. They had been a couple for two wonderful years when Chuck asked her to marry him. She said yes. He had been the happiest man in the world. Later, when she refused him_ _, he had been the most miserable._

}o{

Now that he thought about Janet—something he tried not to do anymore—he recalled that he had _once_ talked to her about his idea, about the project. He hadn't said much. He said what he said because there was an analogy between a problem she was working on (the problem of translating poetry without loss from one language to another) and the general nature of decryption. But surely Janet would not have remembered that bit of conversation? And even if she had, why would she ever have told anyone about it?

Sarah turned the car onto a side road and they were officially out of town. He looked out at the trees and the lush green undergrowth shown by the lights of her car.

"I guess I did mention the project once. I mentioned it to Janet Sanders, my old girlfriend. But that was quite a while ago and I really don't think she would even have remembered it. I didn't say much at all, and the conversation was about something else."

"Okay. Well, maybe that's a place to start anyway. Keep thinking about it and let me know if you think of anyone else you might have talked to about it. _Girlfriend_? Weren't you two engaged?"

}o{

Shit. Sarah wanted to kick herself. Why had she asked that? Now she not only sounded like a bitch, she sounded like a jealous bitch. And she let him know she knew things about him. What must Chuck be thinking? Her tone with him constantly made it seem as if, besides whatever she was saying, she was also telling him _sotto voce_ that she did not want him or resented him. But now she was also suggesting that no one else could have him. Something about the way he said Janet's name had irked Sarah. She _was_ jealous, whether that made any sense or not.

Chuck sighed softly, but she could hear that there was still a tincture of active pain in the sigh—perhaps because the prolonged silence before he named Janet meant that he had been remembering her. That made sense. She knew that she was over Bryce, but active memories of their brief period of good times could still make her melancholy.

"Yes, we were engaged, but that ended. It ended...badly. I haven't seen her in quite a long time and I haven't sought her out. I don't even know where she is or what she's doing."

Sarah was prepared to treat that as a forgivable lie, but something in his voice and manner suggested to her that it was actually true, and suggested something of the struggle that it had involved. Chuck continued to surprise her.

From the beginning, from the moment she met him, although she had not voiced the expectation to herself, she had expected him to be simmeringly defensive, or coolly ironic, or wetly self-pitying, given his fall from academic grace and given the loss of Janet—and given the fact that he knew both were public knowledge—but he seemed like a man with burdens he was willing to carry without taxing others for it. There weren't many men like that—hell, there weren't many people like that.

Sarah turned into the driveway of her house. She had already passed it twice, making sure that nothing seemed out of place. Nothing did. As far as she could tell, it was safe, for now anyway.

It was a small place but made larger by a wraparound porch, the front portion of which was screened in. The house was old—the original structure built before the Civil War. A massive live oak tree stood in the front yard, so massive it looked much more like the house belonged to it than it to the house. Its heavy limbs reached out over the house and almost to the road. It kept the front porch cooler than she had expected.

Sarah had fallen for the house just by seeing pictures on a realtor's website, and it had turned out to be even better when she finally saw it. It was a house ordinary people had lived ordinary lives in for a long, long time. She hoped it might help her to do the same. She spent almost a lot of her time not on campus here, sitting in her rocker on the porch, thinking, drifting, trying not to let feelings that had been in hibernation warm and come back to full life. The live oak seemed responsive to her thinking and drifting and resistance to feeling—and maybe somehow sympathetic to her.

She took walks along the creek that wound behind her house and the other houses in the neighborhood before it splayed out into many small streams and then vanished into muddy swamp waters. She stood there almost every day pondering that muddy water.

Other than when it rained, the creek water at her house was clear. But it was muddy by the time it got to the swamp. She understood the water: she too had started clear and gotten muddy along the way.

She parked the car. She got out and so did Chuck. He was looking in wonder at the live oak. "You know, there are a couple of philosophers who claim that trees actually demand human contemplation, that they compel it. I don't know about that, but I know when I'm in the presence of a life that has mattered and still matters." His tone was reverent. "If I lived here, I'd feel compelled to spend a while on this porch every day," he motioned to the porch, "just contemplating this tree," he motioned back to the tree. Sarah had never thought to put it like that, but it captured her relationship to the tree. Her tree. As she looked at Chuck, she also thought: _My Chuck_. Her mental tone was reverent. She made herself look away.

Sarah led Chuck through the screen door of the porch. She had old-fashioned metal chairs on the porch, along with a large red wooden rocker—her chair (as she explained to Chuck). Chuck took it all in as they passed through. He was the first person other than Carina to be to the house since she had moved in. Carina had never been anywhere but on the porch. Sarah opened the door to Chuck.

}o{

The Spartan character of the house struck Chuck. There was a smattering of furniture. Nothing that looked plush or comfy. Each piece was clearly carefully chosen and of high quality, but there had been no overt attempt at 'home decorating'. The furniture itself decorated the room to the extent that it was decorated. Over the mantel hung a print, the only thing hanging on the walls. Chuck stopped and studied it in the twilit room. He stood still for a minute or two.

"That's a Chirico, right? One of those sad terraces?"

"Yes, It's one of his metaphysical paintings. 'The Enigma of the Hour.'"

"Right, right. I've seen it in a book, but never knew its name. It seems…lonely. The figure seems to be either crushed or abandoned by time, waiting, waiting..."

Sarah waited to respond. "Yes. The clock in it is always at six minutes 'til three. Time has stopped." She stopped. After a long pause, she made herself put a fear into words, share it with Chuck, her fascination with the painting. "Chuck, if time has stopped...is it impossible to wait or possible only to wait?"

Chuck gave her a deeply puzzled look. Sarah did not stay for an answer. She beckoned him on.

}o{

Chuck followed Sarah as she led him through the house. She moved quickly but without hurrying. She walked to her bedroom. Her bedroom had a queen-size bed in it. It was crisply made, but with no comforter or extra pillows. There was one pillow and a blanket, blue. The blanket was turned down a fold or two, revealing the pillow. There was a heavy brown blanket folded carefully and laid on the foot of the bed. It looked like a Swiss Army red cross blanket: it seemed to have a red stripe with a white cross in the center, although Chuck wasn't sure, given the way it was folded.

Chuck saw Sarah glance at him for a moment, and then at the bed before fixing her gaze back on him. She seemed to become angry at that point and scowled. There was a Shaker-style wooden armchair in the room. A plain nightstand stood on one side of the bed with a functional lamp stationed on it. It looked like a soldier's room—or a nun's. Sarah took her scowl to the closet. She grabbed a book of photos. She sat on the bed and began leafing through it. Chuck stepped to her side and looked at the photos. They seemed to be of Sarah when she was young. Most of them were of her by herself, but in several, a lovely woman (her mother?) or a handsome man (her father?) or both appeared.

Sarah was not looking at the photos, however. She reached into the drawer on the nightstand and retrieved a small pocketknife. She grabbed one of the middle pages and delicately cut it open. It was actually two pages taped together. Inside the pocket formed by the taped pages were two credit cards and two driver's licenses. She grabbed them and put them in her pocket. She flipped a few more pages and went through the procedure again. Two keys. She shut the album and returned it to the shelf in the closet.

Her actions hypnotized Chuck. They walked back into the front room. Sarah went to the coffee table in front of the couch. She picked it up and turned it over. Underneath, and made invisible normally by the skirting of the table, were two pistols—held in place by fastened leather straps. She unfastened them and put them in her bag. She went to an end table and did the same. Three boxes of ammunition were held in place. Chuck started to say something, but she gave him a look that made him choke the words back down.

Sarah opened the closet next to the door and took out an ironing board. It had a brightly striped cover on it. She pulled it back. Then she took her pocketknife back out and cut along the edge of the heavy plastic that wrapped the board itself. She extracted five stacks of bills, two of twenties, two of fifties, one of hundreds. These, too, went in the bag. She turned back to Chuck and considered him. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about something—or maybe more accurately, trying to make sure that she had made her mind up about something. She took out her phone, looked at it without actually turning it on, then she frowned and put it back in her bag.

"Ok, Chuck. We need to make a decision. I've made it clear to you that I'm not...simply an Italian professor. I was a CIA agent for many years, often on deep cover assignments. I've lived a life estranged from normality, ordinariness. I came here hoping to reunite with some of that. It was working…reasonably well, kind of…anyway, until you fell into my lap. You can't stay in town. You need to hide. I know how to hide. One option you have: I'm prepared to take you into hiding. But before we go, if we go, I want to make one stop—at Casey's.

"Your other option is to go to the police. I'll take you there myself. But I'll ask that you leave me out of any story you tell them.

"Maybe that would be your best option—except that it would mean having to let people in on the project, and so you might end up increasing your danger down the line. Or you'd have to lie to the police and come up with another story about how and why you're in danger.

"If you come with me, you'll do as I say, you'll listen to my instructions and you'll trust me. Fail to do any one of those things and you may end up captured or worse.

She made him look at her. She held his gaze for a long time.

"Well, Chuck?"

}o{

Sarah knew her tone had grown icier and icier through what she said. Her final words sounded more like a dare than a question. She knew he had no idea how hard it had been for her to let him in the house, to let him see what he saw. It wasn't just that she didn't want him to see her false ID, her guns, her ammunition, her ready cash: she didn't want him to see the chosen barrenness of her life, its deliberate emptiness. Her house looked attractive and inviting on the outside. On the inside, it was a barracks or a cell—a place of secrets and taut discipline, not of relaxation or unguardedness.

She waited for an answer, offering no further words that might warm the earlier icy ones, no action or gesture or facial expression. She would force him to make his choice this way, with little in the way of encouragement. She'd already held his hand. But she had also already made him take his hand from hers. Better to leave their hands separated. If he was going to go with her, it could not be because he was hoping to…hold hands. Or because she was.

Chuck seemed to stand a bit taller—he really was quite tall, much taller than she was—and he replied, "I'll go with you and do what you say. I'll trust you, as long as you don't give me any reason not to do so."

"I'm not sure those are the term I offered, Chuck. There were no riders, no qualifications, no conditions: _Do, Listen, Trust:_ full stop." She still sounded like deep winter in Alaska.

Chuck stepped to her and took her hand before she could refuse the gesture. The same trill started at her fingers and raced to her heart. She thought about her bed in the other room. She made herself stop that.

"Put yourself in my place. I _do_ trust you. I've sort of been trying to get you to see that since the new faculty party, but you won't stop being hostile or stop running for long enough for me to tell you that. I trust you. But you're...punishing me for it.

"You don't _dare_ someone to trust you, do you? Isn't that close to telling someone to believe something they know is unbelievable? If you have to dare me to trust you, then what I do in response to the dare—whatever it is—it won't be _trust_. It would be more like playing dumb. Or maybe like playing some grown-up version of _Simon Says_ —call it _Sarah Says_.

"That's a game I can imagine wanting to play with you," she noticed his eyes flick toward her bedroom, "but not right this minute. Right this minute, I trust you. I understand what you've done for me tonight, so that helps. Still, you've managed to undermine my understanding of almost everything you have done tonight, because while one moment, it seems caring, kind, concerned, the next moment, it seems begrudging, like you're performing a regrettable duty. I don't want to be a burden. I suppose you're the sort of person who does her duty, and I respect that. I really do. I just don't want to be your _duty_. If you're going to save me, I'd much rather you did it because you _want_ me to be saved."

}o{

She dropped her head during this speech. She was looking at her hand in his and feeling it too. He stooped a bit to get her attention and as he straightened back up, her head went up too, holding the eye contact he made with her by stooping. She was looking into his brown eyes. He asked simply, "Do you want to save me?"

Sarah felt lightheaded, like she had walked too far in noontime Florida heat. Her thoughts about her bedroom started again, worse now because she knew he had it on his mind as well. There was an ache in her core worse than she could ever remember. It had been a long time—a long time. But even more important, it had never been with a man who could…affect her so deeply just by touching her arm or her hand. She wanted desperately to know what it would feel like for him to touch her in…other…places.

Her lightheadedness made her wobbly and she tilted forward, her head still up. He was still looking down at her. Her lips found his and she pressed against him to steady herself. Yes. No.

Anyway, that wasn't what was really happening and (who was she kidding? kissing him did not _steady_ her) it wasn't what she was trying to do. _She wanted to kiss him_. She parted her lips for him and he kissed her deeply and completely: she felt the kiss echo in every part of her body. She could feel her kiss somehow echo in his too. They were fastened together outside of time. Then her senses returned to her, including what she thought of as her good sense, and she pushed her hand against his chest (her other hand was still in Chuck's) and separated her lips from his.

She looked at him. She had no idea what to say. He did—more or less. "Yeah, ah, well, um, good answer. Like I said, I trust you."

She moved his hand into hers, reversing the structure. She looked down at their joined hands. She pulled him toward the door. "Good. Let's go."

She was lightheaded still. She needed to avoid thinking about that kiss or attending to its continuing reverberations throughout her body and her psyche. She needed herself and Chuck both in seat belts and on the road so that maybe the restraint of her seat belt would compensate for her own steadily failing self-restraint.

But maybe not.


	4. Chapter 4: Door Opener

**A/N** Moving along. Thanks for reading and responding!

Thanks to michaelfmx for his beta help.

Don't own Chuck. No money made. Hearing from you is the only reward, other than the intrinsic rewards of writing.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Late Friday Night Sept. 1, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Boca Raton, Florida

Outside Sarah's house

* * *

CHAPTER 4 Door Opener

* * *

Chuck watched Sarah stare at her seatbelt for a second, then she lifted her eyes to him. She seemed to be inwardly shaking her head. She took out her cell, turned it on and asked Chuck for Casey's number.

Because of lab security, Chuck knew Casey's cell number—and like most numbers in his life—he had it memorized. He told Sarah and she called Casey.

"Casey, it's Walker. _Unsecure_. I've got… _Tron_ …and need to stop by your place. There was more trouble on campus after you left. Yes, yes…fine. You may want to call your nightshift guy and warn him about black SUVs on campus. If he sees any, make sure he calls the city police. He shouldn't try anything. I have a feeling that whoever is behind those darkened windows isn't to be trifled with. Your address? Right, see you in a few." She ended the call and disabled her phone. She answered Chuck's unasked question about the call. "Calculated risk. I really don't think they know you are with me."

"Why are we going to Casey's?"

"Three reasons: First, I want his opinion about what's going on. He was a Marine, and not just a Marine, he was a serious sort of Marine, the sort chosen for black ops missions run by people…well, people like me. I need to know if he sees an angle here that I am missing.

"Second, you and I need another car. Undoubtedly, they know yours. Now they know this one by description. I don't think they got my plates or they haven't successfully run them yet, but we'd be better off in a car they haven't seen and whose plates we're sure they don't know. I'm hoping he can make a suggestion about that.

"Third, I want someone to anchor what we're doing, someone who can keep track of things here or find out things if we need to know them. We may not need him, but I'd like to know he's available. I have a feeling that whoever is after you is also after something else, some other piece of hardware, maybe. Are you sure you don't have anything about the project written down, voice-recorded, or that you don't have some crucial piece of hardware they could find?"

"No, nothing…Oh, shit. _Again_. There is something. I just never thought about it because it is—to me—ancient history. I don't forget numbers—but other things, especially things I've worked on, can be dicey. I think about the next project, not the last project, about what I will build, not what I have built. Well, in academic matters. Maybe not so much in personal ones. There I can get stuck in the past," he flicked his eyes toward Sarah, "but I'm getting better."

"Anyway, I built a prototype, a simpler version of the heart of the project, back when I was a first-year grad student. I called it The Vortex. Don't look at me like that. Gadgets need names. It's a _draft_ , you might say, of the main encrypting/decrypting engine. On its own, it doesn't seem much more interesting than a basic encryption/decryption device, of the sort you have no doubt seen, but it's more powerful. Or at least, it would be if I make a few changes.

"But the real problem is that the right person—and there are three or four of them around—could take the thing apart and see how to move forward—forward as opposed to reverse engineering, as it were—to the project as it will be. It'd take time and effort and research money to get there, but it'd be like giving someone the seed from which the current project grew." Chuck was shaking his head. "Like Jack's beanstalk beans. No golden-egg-laying goose right away, but maybe down—or up—the road."

"Okay. So, Chuck, where is this Vortex thingy?"

Chuck became sheepish, embarrassed.

"Chuck?"

"It's in South Dakota."

Sarah's eyes were big as she peeked from the road to look at him. "South Dakota?"

"Yeeeeaaah. Kind of a…long story. My only other serious girlfriend—um, I mean other than _Janet_ —was from South Dakota. I went home with her one summer and worked on her father's farm, which is when I built the Vortex. I also left it there…in the…barn. Sort of."

"So, you left a potentially disastrous piece of cutting-edge electronics in a barn. In South Dakota. Because you were dating the farmer's daughter and because… _why_? And why do I feel like we've fallen into a vaudeville routine?"

Chuck grinned a chagrinned grin. And shrugged. "Because I didn't really need the Vortex. I mean, once I built it I knew how it worked. So, I left it with them. With Sally and her father."

"You left it with Sally and her father because they needed a cutting-edge encryption/decryption device? Really?"

"No, I left it with them because no one there needed an encryption/decryption device or cared a hill of beans about one, but they needed a remote to open the barn door, so I repurposed the Vortex to do that job. Just a couple of small changes, really.

"I assume they're still using it. I gave it to them a long time ago, but I built the thing like a little tank and Sally actually sent me a photo of it a few years ago, joking that they still depended on it. She said it was the only piece of white man's electronics that ever lasted."

"Wait," Sarah said, as she pulled into the driveway of what Chuck took to be Casey's house,. " _White_ _man's_ …?"

"Sally is Sioux; she always got a kick out of telling me I was the whitest white man on earth. Her dad thought I was a…riot." Chuck's face told a story of amused frustration.

"Would Janet have ever known about the Vortex?"

" _No_. Maybe? Yes. I showed her the picture when Sally sent it to me. It was just before things…ended. I thought the picture was funny. I never explained what the device was, I just commented that it was the most complicated _door opener_ known on the planet. I never thought that she might have caught on to, or cared about, my double meaning. But then again, she was a word person. She heard things other people might not. She did know my tendency toward _punny_. She might have connected that to my talk about the project—but those conversations were a long time apart. If she connected them, then she must have been paying attention specifically to comments about…my work."

Sarah's gaze fixed on the windshield for a minute, as if she was trying to decide whether or not to say something, and then she clicked her seatbelt and opened her door. Chuck was deep in thought, frowning.

"Chuck, we need to go in. Casey is glaring at us. He'll come out with guns blazing if we don't go in." She waited.

Chuck nodded and got out of the car. Sarah did too. Together, they went inside.

}o{

Casey's home was not what Chuck expected. His wife was a tall, striking woman with short black hair, evidently a handful of years younger than him. Gertrude was her name. She was silent and watchful. She clearly doted on her husband. They had a daughter, fourteen, who looked like both her father and her mother. Tina. The parts of the house Chuck saw were warm and inviting—genuinely homey. The happiness of the family that lived in it seemed to live there too, present and relaxed and abundant in every nook and cranny of the house.

Casey gave Gertrude a kiss and a hug and did the same with Tina. He asked them to give him a minute. They left the kitchen and went to another part the house. Casey sat down at the table and motioned for Chuck and Sarah to sit too.

Chuck listened as Sarah gave Casey a quick, efficient sitrep, telling him what had happened (minus any mention of some handholding and a kiss) and all that Chuck had told her. Casey punctuated her update with grunts and nods, although when she got to Chuck's story about Janet, Sally, and the Vortex, the grunts became groans and the nods became disbelieving headshakes. Chuck felt stupid and contemplated the kitchen tile—it seemed at about his level.

Chuck felt something under the table and realized that Sarah had rested her foot gently on his. Her face had not changed. She continued her update with no sign on her face or in her voice to suggest the contact between them. It felt intimate to Chuck at first, but then he began to lose his confidence, thinking that he had misunderstood the situation.

"So, my best guess," Sarah continued, "is that Janet was playing Chuck. I don't know why. I don't know whose interests she was pursuing." He felt her exert a bit of pressure on his foot. "But it was a remarkable play. She invested years in it, invested her…body in it. Janet had skin in the game." Sarah winced slightly as she heard her own phrasing on playback in the silence that swallowed the kitchen.

It finally hit Chuck what Sarah was saying, had been suggesting all along. He knew why she had her foot on his.

He had thought the point of all this was that Janet was interested in his work and had perhaps put together that the project and the Vortex were related. Maybe she had mentioned it to someone. But Sarah thought that Janet's whole reason for being with Chuck was to glean, to steal, information about his work.

Wait. That couldn't be right, could it? He and Janet had two wonderful years—companions, friends, lovers. _She had loved him_. That's what had made everything that happened so awful. She had loved him. Hadn't she? Chuck realized that Sarah was hoping her touch would steady him. She knew he had not yet understood fully what she suspected and was only now putting it together.

Chuck felt his stomach lurch. He felt his understanding of his own life starting to crumble and topple. Bile rose but he choked it back. He had been so happy with Janet. He had been so miserable without her. The ending was so horrible. Was it all illusory? Was there nothing to have been happy about and so nothing to have been miserable about? Were those green eyes a glittering deception? Were all those spiraling looks into them looks into an abyss of falsehood, not into the deeps of a true heart? Yes, she left him—but she had a reason. Wasn't he to blame? He had blamed himself so much for so long.

Casey listened closely to Sarah. His reaction was slow and measured. There seemed to be a bit of a hitch in Casey's reaction—at least it seemed so to Chuck. When she finished, Casey glanced at Chuck. Chuck knew that Casey could see he was really only now beginning to contend with Sarah's suspicion about Janet. He felt lost, adrift in a past abruptly empty of substance and full of shadows. Sarah reached over and touched his hand for a second. Chuck glanced at her hand and noticed Casey do so too.

"It could be. That kind of long-term seduction happens, I suppose, but it's rare—mostly because it rarely works. Pretending that much for that long: if it doesn't work, you get caught." Chuck noted a shadow cross Sarah's face. "Or it just becomes real. I don't know what to say, Walker. But if Chuck is right and the lines cross only on Janet, then she must somehow be the source of all this, whatever her motivations might have been."

"Well, I have a feeling I'm right," Sarah offered, her words gentle but certain. She stole a glance at Chuck.

Chuck felt his heart clench. Janet. Playing him. Janet playing him: he didn't want to wrestle that dark angel.

Sarah, Chuck realized, was studying his face. He shoved it into a neutral expression—but he was unsure what his expression showed before he realized she was studying him. She kept her foot on his but with added pressure, just enough for the change to register. She touched his hand again.

"Do you know where I can stow my car, Casey, and where we might be able to…borrow another? I want to hide Chuck and they've seen mine and might have the plates."

"I can help you with that." Casey got up and beckoned for them to follow him. There was a large low garage behind the house. When they got inside, Casey clicked on the light. There was an old, well-maintained Land Rover parked beside another in a state of partial assembly. "I rebuild these in my spare time. This one is mine, the one I keep to drive around from time to time. It had a problem with the transmission that it took me forever to fix. It hasn't been out of the garage in a couple of years. I just got it fixed and back together. Runs perfectly. You two take it. Bring your car in here."

Sarah went out and brought her car around while Casey backed the Land Rover out of the garage. Sarah parked the Mazda inside.

Casey traded keys with Sarah. Sarah asked where the bathroom was and Casey told her. She went into the house. Casey put his hand on Chuck's shoulder, forcing Chuck to look at him.

"Look, I know this is overwhelming. I hope we can figure it out quickly and get you back in your lab doing whatever it is you do. But until then, you've thrown your lot in with Walker there.

Let me explain a couple of things to you: If she decides her mission is to protect you—and she clearly has—then you could hardly have done better if you'd asked for a squadron of Seals. Since I got home, I've been talking to some buddies of mine, other black ops guys. We think she's a CIA agent once known as the Ice Queen. When a spy gets a name like that, it means something, Chuck. Do you understand that?" Chuck nodded.

"I don't know why she's here and not still an agent. I don't know what she's running from, what brought her here, but I know her type. I do. I admit I like her, but in general, I am no fan of spooks. So, remember: there are things in her past that she's carrying with her, and if she starts acting like an agent again, those things may resurface in the present. So be careful. Only trust her so far.

"As the wisest man of our time liked to say, 'Trust but verify." Casey pulled out a cigar and lit it.

"Now, let me ask you something. I take it her flight from you at the Union the other day meant she had not encouraged your obvious interest in her?" Again, Chuck nodded. "Ok. Has that changed since all of this started? Has she…encouraged you?" Chuck really wasn't the kiss-and-tell type; he wasn't a fan of PDA and he didn't even want to _describe_ displays of affection publicly. Chuck had always been fiercely private about his love life. Intimacy was supposed to be…well, intimate. But this was a bizarre situation—and he was by now thoroughly confused about Sarah and by Sarah.

"Well, she held my hand a couple of times. She kissed me. I mean she really _kissed_ me." Chuck could feel his eyes start to glaze over with the memory, but he made himself stop. Not before Casey saw it, however.

"Look, I don't want to piss on your parade, Chuck, but you need to be careful here. I believe she's doing this because she has feelings for you. But I can't read her clearly. She's too good." Casey nodded with grudging respect toward the door Sarah had used.

"There's an old technique spies use—it's a kind of variant of Good Cop/Bad Cop used in interrogations. You run hot and cold. You get the asset to respond to you, encourage the response, then you suddenly discourage the response, usually by finding a way to blame your reaction on the asset. Then, when the asset is upset and does not expect it, you do something to encourage him again. It's basically a way of making and keeping the asset lovesick. Lovesick people are easy to control if you are the one who has 'sickened' them, so to speak."

Chuck opened his mouth to speak but Casey went on. "I am not accusing Walker of doing this. Like I said, I don't believe that's what's going on. But it would be wrong of me not to warn you. I don't know if Janet played you or not, but I don't want Walker to play you."

"Why would she? What's in this for her…if not me? Not that I'm much…" Chuck's voice sank as he finished that question. He hadn't fully realized how much he wanted it to be true that she was in this for him until he said the words. That was part of the reason all the talk about Janet was bothering him so much. He had moved on, at last, but it now appeared he had moved on from a woman who was a complete fraud to one who was a complete mystery to him.

"You may not fully have comprehended this, but assuming that what Walker thinks is true, then you and your project are the intelligence community's holy grail. Everyone is going to want you—in a bad way, mostly. I don't know why Walker left the Agency, but if she did it under a cloud, then getting you and this Vortex thing back to the Agency would not only dispel the cloud, it'd vault her star into the firmament. Or, if she were less idealistic or careerist, she could just sell you and the Vortex to the highest bidder, jet away from this overheated terrarium, and live in luxury on a beach, being fanned while sipping icy umbrella drinks."

"How am I supposed to know what she's doing, Casey? How can I know what her motivations are?"

"Listen. Watch. Pay attention. No one can make every word or action false. We give ourselves away every minute if people know when and where to look. Our ability to fool others is rooted in their inattention and their desire to be fooled." Chuck shook his head at himself as Casey said this.

Casey squeezed Chuck's shoulder quickly but sympathetically.

"I have a feeling you're not going to find paying attention to Walker a hardship. So do it. But don't let yourself do it in a moony way. Pay attention. You're smart, Chuck. Trust yourself. " Casey missed Chuck's grimace at the final instruction. Casey had looked back toward the door, to see if Sarah had returned.

"One last warning: given that woman and the way you look at her, keep in mind that if you climb into her bed, and she _is_ playing you, you will climb out of it as her asset. I'm not saying you're weak-willed, Chuck, just that you are pretty far gone—and she is, well…you know, you were chasing her on campus."

}o{

Sarah came back out of the house and handed Casey a slip of paper. "I have a burner phone stowed. I'll pick it up soon. That's the number. Memorize it and then destroy the paper."

Casey looked hurt. "I know the drill, Walker."

Chuck smiled despite the craziness of the last few hours. "I never thought I would actually hear real people say things like that to each other. It's like I'm a character in a Robert Ludlum novel."

When Chuck considered his own words, his smile slowly vanished. Sarah shot him a look and he slumped a bit and went and got in the car.

}o{

Sarah had gone into the bathroom to catch her breath. She washed her face and toweled it dry. Although she had controlled herself in the conversation with Casey, it had been a fight. The echoes of that kiss were still bouncing around inside her. She couldn't stabilize herself.

She was also upset about dumping her suspicions about Janet on Chuck without preparing him. She knew that he didn't fully understand her suspicions when she mentioned them in the car. That was one reason she'd put her foot on his under the table, to try to cushion the blow once he did. The other reason was that now that they had touched—and kissed—not being in physical contact with him was proving unbearable for her. That was _a very bad thing_. She had to regulate herself.

They needed to get out of town and find a place to spend the night. They needed to decide the next step. Maybe all they needed to do was to leave town for a few days, but her instincts told her it would not be that simple. No one who had gone to the trouble of sending those SUVs was just going to give up after a few days. What should they do? How could she handle the way she was feeling if she had to be with him, with him _all the time_ , maybe for days?

She had made choices, made promises to herself. She had made them for what had seemed utterly compelling reasons. Could she just abandon the choices and promises after a few caresses and one spine-melting kiss, one that left her panting, inside anyway, and a little outside too, panting for more? Was she that irresolute? Could the soft warmth of one tall man's lips unravel all her self-imposed bonds?

Her reflection looked poised for a moment to answer that question affirmatively, but then it just looked like she felt: edgy, anxious, flustered and deeply unsure of the woman reflected.

Sarah gathered herself and headed to the door, to rejoin Chuck and get on the road. She saw Casey talking to Chuck. His voice was low; she couldn't hear it through the door. She stopped there for a moment. She was the subject of the conversation—she knew it. Chuck looked increasingly agitated.

What was Casey doing? She knew the answer as soon as she asked herself the question: he's warning Chuck about me. Why, why would he do that? _Casey is unsure of me, that's why_. Not so unsure that he would counsel Chuck to run from her, but still unsure. She realized she could hardly blame Casey for what he felt. She was unsure of herself too.

She deliberately made noise coming out of the door to ensure that she did not hear anything or appear to be trying to hear anything. Casey stepped back and offered Chuck his hand. They shook.

Casey then turned to her and offered his hand. She shook it. He looked directly into her eyes, fastening his gaze to hers. "Take care of him. He's yours, now." Sarah took Casey's full meaning. She tried to return his direct gaze but fell short. She muttered: "I know. I kind of _asked_ for him."

That struck Casey. He hadn't expected it. "Well, good, when it matters, be sure that you remember it."

}o{

They got on the road. Sarah seemed to have a plan, so Chuck let her act on it. Just before they left town, they stopped at a gym. Sarah told Chuck she would be right back and then went in. Chuck waited, playing drums against the dash to a song in his head: Nico Stai's "Miss Friday".

Sarah came back out a few minutes later, carrying a plain, inexpensive gym bag. Chuck chuckled, "Quick workout?"

Sarah smirked. "No, if I wanted one of those, we'd have had it together back at my place."

She turned away from him as she said that, so he lost track of her eyes. Her tone was teasing, but flat enough that Chuck couldn't tell if it was empty banter or the joking registration of an actual desire.

"I rent two lockers there, one under my name the other under…another." Sarah unzipped the bag and fished out a phone. "This is the phone whose number I gave Casey. Here, keep it for me." Chuck couldn't see what else was in the bag. She zipped it closed and pushed it behind the driver's seat. They started back up the road, heading north.

After an hour or so of driving, Sarah pulled the Land Rover into a local motel in Okeechobee, the Blushing Pelican. The headlights of their car showed that the hotel was entirely painted in shades of pink. Its better days were irretrievably in the past. It looked sketchy enough to fit into the strange spy drama that Chuck now inhabited. Sarah reached into her bag and pulled out a few bills. She handed them to Chuck. "Just in case. Pay cash if you buy anything. Do not use a card of your own no matter what you do. Keep your phone disabled. I'll get us rooms."

}o{

The 's', the plural, stuck in Chuck's ear. He knew he shouldn't expect—probably shouldn't want—anything else. But the disappointment was a body blow. He didn't necessarily want anything to happen—although he wasn't sure he could refuse—he just wanted to be near her, to be able to see her.

It took her a little while and Chuck was beginning to sweat in the nighttime humidity. When Sarah got to the car, she handed him a room key. She had one in her hand too.

"They had a pair of adjoining rooms. I got them. That way we can get to one another without having to go outside, without having to make ourselves visible."

She got out of the car and grabbed her bags—and walked to her room. Chuck walked to his room next door. He opened it up and went inside. She did the same.

}o{

Sarah closed the door. She hadn't been sure she could make it to her door without detouring to his. She was breathing hard. She still had the adjoining door to face, but at least she had gotten over one hurdle. She could only jump one at a time.

She put her bags on the bed. She realized then that she had forgotten to grab clothes at her house. _God, how he affects me_.

She unzipped the bag from the gym. In it were some clean clothes, a couple of blouses, a couple of pairs of jeans, a t-shirt, shorts, underwear and a toiletry case. Hidden in the bottom was a stash of knives and a sheath for her lower leg into which all would go. She left it there for now. She took out the t-shirt and shorts (bypassing the jeans) and put them on the bed. She zipped the bag closed and set it on the floor.

She took a shower, then she dried off and got dressed. The t-shirt was badly faded crimson with 'Harvard' across it in white letters. The shorts were white, and they had lace around the legs. They were quite short.

She had forgotten that she had put the shorts in the bag. She had never planned to wear the shorts with…company. She had never really expected to wear them again at all. She never imagined needing the bag, but her habit made her buy the extra locker and stow it. Since she never imagined needing the bag, she had thought of what she put in it as practically thrown away. Now, she was dressed in this old t-shirt and these shorts, and she needed to talk to Chuck.

Chuck knocked on the adjoining door and Sarah told Chuck to come in. The door opened, and Chuck stood there. Like her, he had showered. He had nothing to change into, however, so he had put his clothes back on. He looked at her, noticing her hair still slightly damp from the shower. The t-shirt she knew had shrunk over the years from frequent washing. It was snug. The shorts left her legs completely on display. She was barefoot. She felt as much as saw him see her—all of her. Her breathing sped up. She recognized that she had put the shorts on for this moment. _Damn_.

Chuck walked in and pulled out one of the two chairs in her room, both of which had been stowed under a small table. He sat down, careful to keep his eyes on her face as she looked at him. She joined him, pulling out the other chair. She sat down and found she was unable to discover a seated posture that did not put her legs on display. She fidgeted and repositioned herself a few times. Finally, she just scooted her chair under the table as far as she could.

Chuck watched her, unclear at first about what was happening. But then he figured it out. It was his turn to smirk at her. "Thanks for those shorts; they were a kindness—in a way. If it can be called a kindness to make things…harder."

He looked down when he said this, keeping his eyes from her. He matched her earlier flat tone. Whatever exactly he intended for her to take from those comments, she knew one thing for certain: she wanted to take off those shorts—and she wanted to share taking them off with Chuck. She crossed her legs. She uncrossed them. She crossed them.

Chuck looked back up. "Ok. What now?"

She inhaled sharply enough for Chuck to hear it, although she did it unintentionally. She ignored what she had done. She knew what he meant, didn't she?

"We need to figure out our next move. We're safe here for tonight. But we need to decide how to respond to what has happened beyond hiding. I can't get a feel for who is behind this. Right now, it doesn't matter much, I guess. We just need to know what their next move is. The whole thing feels off. Anyway, if they can't get to you, what can they do?

"It seems like the answer may be: go after the Vortex. If they haven't done that yet, then maybe they have some sense of what you told me, that getting the Vortex is not going to simply give them the secrets of the project. But if they can't have you, then maybe they'll decide that it would be better to have the Vortex than to have nothing?"

"But, Sarah, how would they know anything about the capacities of the Vortex? Even if Janet was…playing…me, I never told her anything definite about what it would or wouldn't do."

"You said Sally sent you a picture of the Vortex? Is it possible that Janet could have gotten a copy of that picture?"

"Well, I guess. Sally sent the picture to me by email. I never gave Janet my email password, but I also rarely worried about logging out around the house. She could have gotten on my account and printed a picture or downloaded it and made a copy, then deleted the download. I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have suspected. I never suspected her of anything, Sarah. How could I, given what happened?"

Sarah didn't follow that thread, although she was curious where it led. What had happened between them? His 'How could I?' was an odd question—aimed at himself, she knew, not at her.

"We can talk about that later. But, look, could one of these people you mentioned, people who could work toward the secrets of the project from the Vortex, could they tell anything about it from Sally's picture?"

Chuck fell into serious thought. After a long silence, he looked up. "Maybe someone could guess that the Vortex wasn't capable of much by studying the picture. I mean, I never actually set it up to interface directly with anything else. Well, anything but the barn door, but it did that remotely. I just built something I knew could do the kind of thing I was imagining, I didn't ever plan to use it to do it. I never did use it. I was just keeping myself busy during those long nights in the barn."

"Wait. You mean you _slept_ in the barn?"

"Sally's dad wouldn't allow me in the house between sundown and sunup." Chuck's countenance fell. Sarah began to chuckle, then to laugh. Chuck began to laugh too. "That man scared me. He still scares me."

"Didn't you win the Gödel Prize that fall?" Sarah was still laughing, even as she became incredulous.

"Yes. Yeah, I did."

"So Farmer…?"

"Hinto."

Sarah smiled. "So Farmer Hinto banished the Gödel Prize winner-to-be to the barn for a summer. And you agreed to this?"

"Sure. I liked Sally—a lot. She was a handsome girl, quick and funny and very opinionated. She was the best judge of character I've ever known. I liked her dad. I think he even liked me. I reckon he found me staying in the barn funny. He may even have expected me to fight him. Maybe Sally did too. She was less amused than her father, less amused even than me. We had expected to be…together more that summer."

Sarah started laughing again. She could imagine Sally's frustration with the situation. Having what she wanted so near and yet not to be able to have it. Yes, she could imagine that frustration. She uncrossed then re-crossed her legs.

"How is it that you knew I won the Gödel Prize?" Chuck narrowed his eyes as he smiled a little.

"I hear things. So, you take it that the right person could have figured that the Vortex would be of limited value from the photograph?"

"I guess so. And you think that now that they've lost me, they may decide to get the Vortex after all, even though it isn't itself going to do much for them?"

"I do. Can you call Sally? Do you know her number?"

"No."

"Can we look it up?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Farmer Hinto doesn't believe in phones."

"So you could email her? She emailed you."

"Yeah, but it may be a few days before Sally sees the email."

"Why?"

"The computer she uses belongs to her father's sister, and Sally only visits there on the weekends."

"Didn't you say she was a graduate student too?"

"Yes, but not in computer science. She was a grad student in history. She now teaches high school in Bozeman, Montana. She spends the summers working the farm and reading and writing."

"Is your email secure, do you think? It sounds like security has not been a huge concern for you in the past."

"It hasn't been. Not in my home, anyway, and especially not around people who I think love me…"

"So, your email?"

"I have a highly encrypted account I can use. No one will know. I set one up for Sally too, years ago. I put it together to show her how such things can be done. She kept it because she works during the year with at-risk kids and she wanted to be sure her email would not be tampered with."

Chuck pulled his computer out of his bag. He clicked away at the keys. He sat back, flabbergasted. "Huh!"

"What is it, Chuck?"

"I haven't checked this account in the last few days—with the term starting up…and so on," he glanced at Sarah: she knew she was the 'and so on', "and there's an email here _from Sally_." He reported on it aloud as he read.

"She's on her way here…with the Vortex. She says that a couple of men in dark suits came around last week, asking about me. She could tell they were looking for something…but not really looking for me. She knew it had to be the Vortex. At one point, they…sort of threatened her dad. He left the farm. He went to other friends…deep in the Badlands. He's safe. It's a slow time on the farm, and she doesn't start school in Bozeman for a while, so she's flying down to visit me and return the Vortex to me. Ah…um...she is, uh, _looking forward to seeing me_ ….Um, she gets into Boca tomorrow."

Sarah felt tense all over. Sally was coming to Boca—and looking forward to seeing Chuck. Why did Sarah think that was not _exactly_ what Sally had said? Maybe it was the gist of it, but she was sure Chuck had tamed Sally's phrasing. Sally wanted Chuck. She could not have Chuck. Sarah wasn't tense, not really, and she might as well just admit it to herself—she was jealous.


	5. Chapter 5: Crisscross Double-cross

**A/N1** Very glad, and pleasantly surprised, that so many are sticking with my talky little story. Thanks so much. And thanks so much for your responses—reviews and PMs.

Continued thanks to michaelfmx for his patient beta work.

Don't own Chuck. No money made.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Very late Friday Night Sept. 1, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Okeechobee, Florida

The Blushing Pelican Motel

* * *

CHAPTER 5 Crisscross Double-cross

Sarah listened to Chuck's report about Sally with mixed and mixed-up emotions. It meant that the two of them were not going to have to make a road trip to South Dakota, a long, hard trip. That was what she had expected as the next step. Good. But it also meant that the two of them were not going to have to make a road trip to South Dakota, _alone together_ on a long, hard trip. Bad. Damn. She uncrossed her legs.

Chuck seemed surprised, concerned and unsure. He snuck a glance up at her while he finished reading the email. She knew he was making note of the flight number and arrival time—and that he was trying to judge her reaction to the news of Sally's arrival.

What was her reaction? She could no longer be coy with herself. She was deeply affected by Chuck. She had thought all that _love at first sight stuff_ was rom-com drivel. _Lust at first sight_ : she knew that was possible. In fact, lust was typically a _first-sight_ phenomenon. She had been the object of it countless times, and the subject of it a few. But could you fall in love at first sight? Maybe. Maybe...maybe you could _foresee_ at first sight that you would fall in love.

Romeo, Romeo?

What did the abstract issue matter? Though there was an urgent desire in her response to Chuck, it was by no means the dominant note in her response. The desire was _one note_ —insistent and hard to ignore, to be sure—but Chuck caused a complicated _chord_ in her to be struck, a combination of high notes and low, of respect and admiration and fun (when she let herself thaw, let herself breathe) and of desire and of…slightly wicked…longings. She marshaled her thoughts and sent them in another direction.

"Ok. Well, then I guess our next moves are clear. We hide, and we wait for Sally. Where was Janet Sanders, last you knew?"

"Seattle, maybe. But I meant it when I said I haven't kept up with her. That's where she said she was going right after the break-up. I've never heard from her or tried to contact her."

"So, you and Janet were together for how long?" Sarah's tone was not as detached as she hoped.

"A while. A little over two years all told. We were just a few days out from the wedding when things ended."

"How did things begin? How exactly did you meet?"

Chuck told her. She listened carefully, but with spiking jealousy in her chest. Why? He wasn't hers—was he? What had she said to Casey? What had Casey said to her? She said she asked for him.

"…So, that's how we met." Sarah was struck by the story. Not so much by the way that they met or by what he said about Janet. Sarah had seen the one picture of her online and read a blurb, and already knew Janet was beautiful and smart. She was struck rather by the way Chuck told it.

His deep empathy and his imaginative engagement with people: that was the thing about him that struck her about his gaze too. When he looked at her at the faculty party, he was looking at her and looking _inside_ her all at once: he wanted to know and was actively trying to imagine, what it was like to be her. That same imaginative engagement was everywhere in the story. He didn't tell the story slanting it against Janet.

It was no wonder that Janet had been able to play him for so long. Chuck cared too much about other people to play the game of universal suspicion that most people played part-time, and spies played-full time. His empathy had blinded him to Janet's gamesmanship. Chuck was so uninterested in manipulating others that he could scarcely attribute such a motive to others. In fact, he would have thought to attribute such a motive to Janet a failure to empathize imaginatively, since Chuck's empathy was built on the presupposition that others were, at bottom, trying to do good—perhaps clumsily, perhaps confusedly, but still trying. Chuck's charity toward Janet kept him from seeing her cheat him.

Sarah had to admit that, in the past, she would have thought Chuck benighted. A sap. She would have thought he chose to shut his eyes to doubts, to the certainty of evil in human hearts. Sarah had been the opposite of Chuck: her suspicion was built on the presupposition that others were, at bottom, evil. Sarah had eventually come to understand that building on that presupposition meant that she had to fall under her own suspicion. Why would she alone be exempted from that evil? Sarah was too honest to exempt herself. A universal _generalization_ was a _universal_ generalization, after all.

Coming to understand this played a role in her quitting. She didn't want to be an object of her own suspicion. But that meant recognizing that she could no longer live out that suspicion. She would have to take people as they came, individually. Doing that had turned out to be far harder than she expected.

Even though she was still struggling to rein in her suspicions, she did not think Chuck's attitude sappy or purposefully ignorant. Although she knew it was not Chuck's motive for having the attitude he did, the attitude allowed him to be kind to himself, forgive himself, make peace with himself. That, she guessed, was itself hard, but her attitude of universal suspicion made it impossible, and even her current attitude still got in her way, made it easier to be unkind to herself than to be kind to herself.

It was a bitter thought, but she sometimes worried that she would eventually exempt everyone else from her suspicion but herself. She would remain suspicious of Sarah—but of no one else. _Maybe all her choices and promises…_ Chuck interrupted her thoughts.

"Sarah, you seem awfully sure Janet was playing me—a _seduction_ , I think. Why are you so sure?"

"I'll explain that in a minute. But tell me about your breakup first."

Chuck's face fell, crumbled. He looked ill, stricken. "Are you sure this is relevant? You won't like me much once you've heard it. I don't like me much when I remember it."

}o{

Sarah just nodded. So, Chuck started, started remembering aloud:

 _We were getting close the wedding. I was happy, really happy, about it all. Janet had started to seem stretched and stressed. I thought it was due to wedding jitters and because she had no family, really, to attend the wedding. Her mother had died during childbirth and her father died while she was in high school. She had a grandmother who had been very involved in raising her, but she had died before her father. She wanted a small, private ceremony. I didn't want a large one, but I wanted one that was larger, that would allow all the people I cared about to take part in it._

 _The one person who was going to be in the wedding for Janet was her best friend—her maid of honor—Tamara. I had never met Tamara. We'd tried to get together with her a couple of different times, but she was a photojournalist and always on the road; it never worked out. She showed up about three weeks ahead of the wedding. She'd taken some time off finally and decided to spend it in California with us._

 _It was great. Janet seemed far less stressed, happier. She and Tamara spent a lot of time together, hanging out, shopping, clubbing. I didn't see much of Janet for a while, but I thought that was good. She had a friend in town, someone to spend time with. I had classes to teach and research to do, so I was busy anyway._

Chuck paused. He could begin to see the pattern.

 _At a certain point, Tamara started hanging out with me a little bit each day, usually when Janet was in class. We got along well, and she was easy to talk to. Then one day, Janet accused me of being interested in Tamara. I told her that wasn't true. I liked Tamara, she was attractive, but I loved her. Janet calmed down, but she seemed to be watching me whenever Tamara was around. She had been telling me since Tamara and I met that Tamara thought I was cute._

 _Janet and I had planned to have dinner, finally to spend a little time alone together. I had invited her to my house and I had cooked. I wanted her all to myself. But Janet didn't show up. Tamara did. Something had come up on campus and Janet was going to be late, so she'd sent Tamara to explain. Janet was late, really late. Finally, Tamara and I ate the meal I made. I kept trying to get in touch with Janet, but she never picked up. Tamara was sweet about it, but I could tell she was uncomfortable with the situation too. So, I got out the wine I had been saving and we drank it together._

 _The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed. I was…naked. Tamara was too, and on top of me. Janet was standing in the doorway, screaming at us. We weren't…right then…um, doing anything, but Tamara was naked…I guess I said that… and prone on top of me. Janet ran from my apartment and we never really talked again after that, not face to face. I got the engagement ring back the next day. It had been left on my office desk at Stanford._

Chuck stopped and gathered himself. Sarah could tell how utterly ashamed he was, and how hard it was to tell this story.

 _I had never cheated on a woman I was dating. Never. How could I have cheated on my_ fiancée? _I just didn't, and I still don't understand it. I guess I drank more than I should have, that we both did. Maybe Janet was right, maybe I was attracted to Tamara, shit, I don't know anything about any of that. It was a complete mess. Janet wouldn't talk to me. Tamara left town. Janet's friends ostracized me. Hell, my friends, the few I had, avoided me. My sister was ashamed of me. I fell apart. My life went dark. It took me a long time to find any light again at all._

}o{

"…That's how it ended, Sarah. I did it. It was my fault. My mess. My mortification. I don't understand it and I'm as…ashamed of it now as I was then. But you asked, and you seem to think it matters, so that's the story, the whole, awful truth. Or as near as I can come to it."

Chuck wouldn't make eye contact with her. He stared at his own hands. They were shaking.

"You think she was playing me. Maybe. I get it. But I don't know, Sarah; I did what I did. Whatever was true of Janet and what she was up to, I believed what I believed. I was going to marry her, and I cheated on her with her best friend."

}o{

Sarah's heart ached for him. He'd been carrying this burden around for a long time. She hadn't seen it as clearly as she should have because she'd been so caught up in her own reactions to Chuck.

Chuck's attitude toward others may have allowed him to be kind to himself, to forgive himself, but he hadn't managed it to do it where this one thing was concerned. The fresh, live guilt and pain were on his face. He kept rubbing his hands together, as if he were washing them, trying to rub the shaking away.

Sarah knew she had reached a crossroads. It was not the first one she had reached with Chuck and surely not the last, but an important one. What she needed to tell him, explain to him, would probably be as unpleasant as what he had just told her, although the nature of the unpleasantness would be different.

She was positive she was right about Janet. The story of the breakup convinced her even more. Chuck was worried about what she thought of him after hearing that story. She was worried about what Chuck would think of her after she explained what she needed to explain. She was hoping she could keep their talk focused in the right way. She bit her lip.

"Chuck," she plunged in, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but you were the victim of a long con. Janet was playing you; it was a con game. Tamara was Janet's exit strategy. When you first started telling me about Janet, I felt like she was playing you. But I thought that she was a spy working for a foreign government. I no longer think that. I think she was a spy, of sorts, maybe—but the espionage was corporate, not governmental. Someone out there with a lot of money wanted to keep tabs on you and on what you were doing. Janet was the way that person accomplished it. I'm sorry."

"How can you be sure, Sarah? You weren't there. I was."

"True. But let's just say that I know some things about cons, about the people who run them, about how they work, the patterns they exhibit. The con run on you is rare, mainly because there are very few people who can pull it off. To pretend as Janet pretended is almost impossible. Casey was right. Eventually, you give yourself away, you slip up, or you stop pretending, and what was a con becomes your actual life. Take it from me, Chuck, pretending has its limits. It cannot be perfect, or it stops being a pretense. A pretense is either imperfect or it is a reality.

"I did deep cover work for the CIA, Chuck, I know something about…covers. When you're in deep cover, you do your best to adopt your cover identity completely. But you can't, or it stops being your cover identity—it just becomes the new you. So, you have to find a way to step out of the cover, to be who you really are. That means you find time away from everyone you're trying to deceive. Green Berets sent to spy on terrorist groups, if they are there for a long time, sharing meals and conversations and so on, often just stay, they switch sides. What they spend all their time pretending just becomes what they're really doing."

Sarah looked lost in her own thoughts for a moment and her eyes clouded.

"During the time you and Janet dated, did you spend all of your time together or were you often apart?"

"We were apart a lot. She had her research, I had mine. She had her classes to take, I had mine to teach."

"Right. And did you have any friends on the Comp Lit faculty?"

"No."

"Was that building anywhere near yours?"

"No."

"So, you rarely, if ever just bumped into Janet on campus? Really, maybe, just the first couple of times?"

Chuck was beginning to see the pattern in her questions and his answers. "That's true, I guess…Was she not really in that program?"

"Oh, I'm sure she was in it. How she got in might be an interesting question to pursue. But let's not for now. Assume she was. Her cover would work best if she was. It's even possible she was in the program before she was recruited for the con, although that's less likely.

"So, you two spent time together on dates—and, I assume, after dates?"

Sarah tried to sound dispassionate, uninvested. She didn't really manage it.

Chuck balked for a moment, then nodded.

"She was never willing to live together, right?"

A nod.

"She would spend the night, but leave early the next day, except perhaps on special occasions?"

Another nod, followed by a sigh.

"I'm guessing that the dates were normally pretty intense, pretty breathless?"

Chuck made a face but nodded.

"You see, don't you, Chuck, what she was doing? She was keeping a fairly strict limit on the amount of time she was exposed to you. Controlling the amount of time to control her liability to a mistake. The longer she was with you, the more likely it was that she would give herself away.

"She made sure that her story meant that there were no family members to meet, and the one best friend was always unavailable. When you were together she kept you…preoccupied with her. Given that you didn't see her a lot, that was easy. She knew you would be eager, focused only on her. So, the con mostly boiled down to whether you found her attractive enough to be pulled in...and whether she found you attractive enough to sleep with you regularly."

She worked hard to keep her tone from becoming professional at the end. While she didn't want to sound jealous, even if she was, although it was all history, she also did not want to sound professional; she knew what a slap that would be to him, to treat something so intimate that way.

Chuck put his elbows on his knees and dropped his head into his hands. "So, you're saying she only pretended to have sex with me?"

"Um, no, Chuck. She did not _pretend_ to have sex with you. You were there: Janet had sex with you. Tamara pretended to _have had_ sex with you—note the past tense. I'll get back to Tamara in a minute.

"Janet was going to have to have sex with you. Not just once but repeatedly...a lot. Given that it was a long con, part of her goal would be to move the relationship along, to get you to fall in love with her and to convince you that she had fallen, or at least that she was falling, in love with you. But that meant that the sex had to be convincing in a specific way. She had to allow you to make love to her and she had to convince you that she was making love to you. Now there are certain bodily changes, Chuck, that really can't be faked, not in the moment. She needed to find you attractive enough for those…changes to occur. She didn't pretend to have sex, she pretended to make love, or, if you want, she had sex with a man she pretended to love. Anyway, she had to find you attractive.

"She obviously did. My guess...is that you're an…attentive lover," Sarah blushed, and she slid her chair a little farther under the table. Chuck found the pattern on the motel window curtains completely absorbing for several seconds. They finally looked at each other and Sarah went on.

"That would be a…good thing for Janet…and a bad one. If she found you attractive, and you were attentive, it would make having sex with you easier, because she could enjoy it. But it would also make having sex with you dangerous because she could end up really feeling…um, you know, _emotionally_ …what she was supposed to only pretend to feel. An old friend of my dad's used to say: _if two people lie down together, one or both will get up with feelings._ That's an exaggeration, but it captures something that's typically true. What we do with our bodies affects our souls—let me put it that way, even if it sounds…too…I don't know… _metaphysical_. Remember, I teach Italian medieval literature. Someone for whom that is not true is…deeply confused or troubled…or something. As Dante likes to put it, the human soul and body are knotted together: they really can't be completely separated without each losing its nature.

"Anyway, Janet had to have spent all those nights with you responding to your…attentions in a way that you would believe. She had to respond in some ways she could not fake. And you had to believe she was…making love to you, not just having sex with you."

Sarah stopped for a minute. The whole conversation was embarrassing and unpleasant for them both. She could see the disillusionment on Chuck's face, and the outrage. How much better was it, really, to go from _cad_ to _dupe_ —and that was how he must see himself in what she was telling him, see himself as moving from one category, villain, to another, fool. But, for Sarah, explaining all this meant acknowledging, and at least vaguely imagining, Chuck's time with Janet. Acknowledging and imagining it made her feel slightly and weirdly voyeuristic and…jealous. And pissed. She would like to have a few minutes of…conversation with Janet. That was one level. At still another level, explaining it made her sad and forced her to remember things she wanted to just…not think about, completely forget. Family stuff.

Chuck was quiet. After a minute, he asked, without looking at her. "So, the point you're making is that Janet had to find a way to stay _in between_ —she had to…genuinely respond to me or risk discovery—but the genuine responses could lead to still more genuine responses, and so on, until she was not pretending? If that happened, she would no longer be conning me. She had to respond enough to be believable but not so much that she herself believed, became what she was supposed to merely pretend to be?"

"Yes, Chuck. And that's why what she was doing is hard to do for as long as it normally takes. You either get caught or you 'go native', if you'll pardon the phrase. There may be a few really hardened cons out there who could actually fall in love with someone and still successfully con them, but not many."

"Could Janet have been coerced, Sarah? Maybe the person she was working for blackmailed her?"

"That's possible, Chuck. But I doubt it. What she was doing, even if carefully controlled in the ways she controlled it, would be incredibly demanding, exhausting. If she were being coerced, that would make it all worse. Too much worse. You would have discovered her, she would have slipped. Given how well she did what she did, I'm guessing she chose it. _Nothing chosen is unbearable._ I don't mean that she didn't want, even need, the money she made, or whatever, just that she wasn't being coerced by threats against herself or someone she cared about.

"The bottom line is that it was a real woman who did this, one who had to live a real life to the extent that she could, alongside or mixed in with the massive deception she was perpetrating. We think we can imagine some perfect con who could somehow do nothing but what her con required and do nothing her con didn't require, but that is to imagine a god running a con, not a human being—in this case, a human woman."

Chuck hesitated. "You seem to know a lot about this…CIA experience, covers and so on?"

Sarah knew Chuck wasn't deflecting, he was just thinking about what she had told him, the authority with which she spoke. She wasn't willing to go far in this direction—not far at all. But she owed him something. He'd taken all she had dished out stoutheartedly.

"Yes, partly, we learn a lot about seductions at the Farm and…on the job." She knew her tone bristled slightly, but she didn't want to have this conversation with him.

}o{

Chuck noticed her 'No Trespass' sign and turned in another direction, back into himself.

"So, if I'm getting all of this, then Tamara was the final part of the con, so to speak. Her role was to give Janet a way out of the wedding, right?"

"Right. They planned it all along. Exit strategy. Janet made remarks about Tamara being attracted to you to plant two different seeds: one, since Tamara was attractive, if you were tempted to be unfaithful, being told that Tamara found you attractive might cause you to yield to temptation, try something, and in so doing give Janet her exit. Knowing you, I figure she didn't expect that to be how things would play out. Or, two, being told that Tamara found you attractive would make the scripted scenario she planned make sense to you, seem believable.

"She could do what she did, give Tamara an opportunity to drug you, get you and her undressed, and give Janet time to get to your place. Then, they probably gave you something to wake you slowly, and they played out the little melodrama: Janet has a reason to leave you, you're ashamed and guilty and not in a hurry to talk about what happened; she makes her exit, neat."

Chuck's face had gone blank. His eyes were unfocused. He was caught up in a past that was and was not his past—not real in the way he thought, real in a way he had not thought. A shame he had carried was a fake shame fashioned for him to carry. Sarah reached out to him. He gave a slight jerk as he re-inhabited the present. She smiled at him kindly.

"I'm really sorry to say all this, and really sorry it happened to you. I really am _sorry_." Sarah then looked around the room and gestured at it as a way of gesturing at their current circumstances. "And I am sorry about all of _this_."

She stopped talking and waited…and waited…for Chuck to start. He did, at last.

"Well, thanks, and I thank you for being sorry about the fiasco with Janet." He made a bitter sound. "But you should temper your sorrow with the recognition that I've been proven to be a gullible fool of the first rank."

Sarah leaned into the table and extended her arm, her hand, to him. He stared for a second and then his gaze traveled up her arm to her face. He took her hand. She felt the same now-familiar reaction, a trill that ran from her fingertips to her heart. He gazed into her eyes and she met his gaze.

"You're _not_ a gullible fool. This was a carefully plotted and remarkably professional con, run by an intelligent and committed con artist. Was it detectable? Sure, but it was set up to be difficult for you to detect it. All your best emotions and instincts were used against you. But that doesn't mean those are not your best emotions and instincts. I would…I'd give a lot to be like you, Chuck. To see people the way you do. Charitably…expecting the best. You just need to extend yourself that same charity. You were fooled. But getting fooled doesn't make you a fool, no more than taking one drink makes you a drinker. _You're no fool, Chuck Bartowski_."

Sarah's sudden vehemence surprised them both a little.

Chuck laughed in wry self-amusement. "I admit I didn't feel like a fool until that new faculty party when I saw a woman who reoriented my world. Turns out that seems to be her habit."

Sarah squeezed his hand and he squeezed it back. She was suddenly aware of her bare legs, and of the proximity of Chuck, and of the bed in her room. She wanted to put her bare foot on his, but she was certain she wouldn't be able to stop once they were in contact hand and foot: she would want full body contact. Her need would demand it. It was already getting insistent—a rapidly increasing thrum of desire.

}o{

Chuck wanted to take Sarah's hand and pull her up into an embrace. He wanted to cup her face and kiss her. He wanted to touch her long, bare legs, to run his hands along them.

Then he had a second thought—or maybe it was a third or fourth or fifth. The woman he wanted to…the woman he wanted so much was a former CIA agent whose motives were still unclear to him, even if he trusted her.

Even more, she was a former CIA agent who had detailed, authoritative knowledge of confidence games, of the people who played them and of the difficulties of playing them—knowledge. How had she gotten it? Whether it had been a cover or a con, Sarah knew the insides of the play too well.

Casey's warning rang again in Chuck's head. _The hot/cold thing_. Hadn't she done that to him all along? What if she was conning him right now? What would be more effective than a con built on the exposure of another con—a _meta-con_? Was that t-shirt that hugged her so amazingly really an accident? Those shorts—he couldn't look at them without getting a little dizzy, even thinking about them was causing the room to slow-spin—were they planned? She could hardly have planned better: the t-shirt and the shorts were about to kill him.

Kill him.

He had to pull back from the precipice. He did. He yanked his hand from hers so quickly that it caused surprise followed by pain in her eyes. At least, it looked like it did. Chuck realized that he was too…agitated to think about Sarah, and if he held her hand any longer, the agitation would worsen. On top of that agitation was the new confusion about his past. If Sarah was right about Janet—and Chuck had a cold-fingered certainty clutching at his heart that she _was_ right—then the last few years of his life had been structured by falsehoods, not by his own misbehavior.

That surely was good news, bad news. Maybe his morals were not as easily compromised as he had thought, but his ability to know and understand the world around him now fell into question. It was hard to know if that really counted as a net gain or a net loss. He supposed it was a net gain, but still…

"Sarah, I'm sorry." He tried to make up for yanking his hand away by his conciliatory tone. "This has _all_ ," he imitated her gesture to the room, to the whole situation, "been a little too much for me."

He stood and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, knowing that it must have made him appear a petulant boy. Sarah's face showed disappointment—and a hint of relief. Chuck didn't know how to parse the two, so he turned and walked back to his room, closing the adjoining door.

}o{

He was by himself again, as he had been since that awful morning with Janet and Tamara. He hadn't dated since then, not seriously.

He had gone out to coffee a couple of times with a couple of women. He had taken female friends to parties where he was expected to live up to a _plus one_ invitation. But he had not been willing to trust himself again. He had not really had too. Whether it was because Janet had poisoned everything or whether he had not met anyone who moved him since Janet, he had not met a woman who caused him to consider trusting himself again, to consider reconsidering his own past actions, and trying to forgive himself.

He knew he had never _felt_ like he cheated on Janet, not even drunkenly. He had never been attracted to Tamara in that way, not at all. He was not a heavy drinker. The whole situation had felt wrong to him, but he had attributed the feeling to what he took to be his own, undeniable wrongness, or to some sad impulse toward self-justification. But now that he could begin to discriminate among his own reactions, he recognized his sense that it had felt wrong, isolated among all the feelings of guilt and recrimination. It didn't help much to know this now—but at least he had not been completely flummoxed, even if stronger, incorrect feelings had swamped his weaker but correct one.

Seeing Sarah changed everything, began everything anew: light shone on the face of his deep: suddenly, there was light. A woman moved him again, more than any woman, including Janet, had ever done; it was like he'd never before been moved by a woman. She drew him to her, drew him to talk to her—not at all his style. He had approached her again after she had rebuffed him. He had gone looking for her after she ran from him. He kept trying to warm her up every time she froze him out. Why? Because in her eyes he'd seen _her_ —gotten a glimpse of who she really was—and although he could not articulate what he saw in that glimpse, he'd never seen anything like it, never been attracted equally by anything, by anyone. Something in her eyes caused him to forget to mistrust himself. Seeing her was his re-creation.

Now, though, he was unsure. He was not unsure of how much she moved him, but of the wisdom of letting it affect him, of letting it carry him away. He had not fought it, not really, not hard, anyway, until now. If he was fighting it now. It wasn't obvious that he was. Casey had warned him. Maybe she had too when she admitted she knew about what Janet had done by training and… _experience_. What did that mean? Did he want to think about what that meant? He didn't want to think about what that meant.

He pulled back the comforter on the bed and got on top of the covers, his clothes still on. Staring at the ceiling, he thought about Janet again, about how it had been to be with her. He had only slept with two women in his life. Janet—and Sally. Since Tamara didn't count, it turned out.

Sleeping with Sally, being with Sally generally, had been good. Things between the two of them, her father's interference aside, had always been good until they both realized they were rooted in different places: Chuck at Stanford—it was already known they planned to make him a tenure-track job offer; and Sally in Bozeman—she had accepted a teaching job there, and had her community work. They had mutually decided to part, although the decision had been very painful—difficult and sad for them both. But over time their friendship proved stronger than the difficulty, and they got back in touch and stayed in touch. Janet never seemed to mind his friendship with Sally while they were together.

For a little while after the fiasco with Janet, Sally had seemed interested in revisiting their decision to part, especially once Chuck was no longer at Stanford and could possibly move, but Chuck was unwilling, despite being interested himself. He was still unable to trust himself, and he feared the possibility that he might put Sally through a second run of the same difficulty as before, since she was unlikely to move and the chances of him getting a faculty position near her were remote.

He had not seen Sally in person in a long time. He would see her tomorrow.

}o{

Chuck was supine on the bed with his eyes closed for a long time when he heard the adjoining door open, although no light shone through. He could feel Sarah looking at him, although she was still standing, he believed, in her room. He didn't move.

She finally crossed the threshold into his room. She padded noiselessly to the side of his bed—he could feel, not hear, her footfalls. She seemed to be standing over him in indecision. Whatever had put her in motion, it had gotten her to the side of his bed, and then its propulsive force had waned. She seemed to think he was asleep. He thought about doing something to make it clear that he was not, but by now he seemed committed to the ruse. He'd have to pretend to wake up at this point. That seemed worse than just keeping with the pretense of being asleep.

He heard her voice, barely more audible than a thought, tremulous with an emotion that he had not heard from her before. "Chuck Bartowski, you're making me crazy. How did I both find you and find myself back in this life again? I'm _aching_ to be in that bed with you. But…I just can't. I promised myself... There are days I don't want to revisit. But I ache for you. I thought that maybe coming in here and telling you, saying the words at least, sharing it, might make the ache less unbearable."

Her breath caught. He could hear her trembling as she sighed. And then she was gone. He was aching too.

Or had she known he was awake all along? He didn't believe so, didn't reckon she did, but that cheery thought sang him to sleep, off-key.

* * *

 **A/N2** How does Sarah know so much about Janet's sort of play? No, not like _that_. Answers in the next chapter. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 are the pivots of the story.


	6. Chapter 6: Second Sight Second Thought?

**A/N** Saturday Morning in Okeechobee. What could be sweeter? Thanks, folks, for your kind attention. Drop me a line-a review or a PM.

Thanks to michaelfmx for his kind attention to my scribble scrabbles.

Don't own Chuck.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Saturday Morning Sept. 2, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Okeechobee, Florida

The Blushing Pelican Motel

* * *

CHAPTER 6 Second Sight, Second Thoughts?

* * *

Chuck woke up early. He had wound himself into a knot of limbs and blankets by the time his eyes opened. He had gotten up not long before dawn and taken off his clothes in an attempt to get comfortable, sleeping in nothing but his boxers. He was going to have to get some clothes today. The ones he had would ripen quickly in the heat after a long day's wear yesterday.

He took another shower to invigorate his lumbering mind. He had dreamt of Janet and Sally and Sarah, all talking to him, all telling him things, each arguing with the other, none agreeing, except they each accused the other two of lying. He had no way of knowing what to believe or who to believe or why. There were just words and words and words, but none of them seemed to have any weight, to mean anything in particular.

He put his head under the shower, turning the water slowly toward cold as he did. His mind began to get limber, the booming, buzzing, confusing words of his dream slowly sloughing off, spinning down the drain.

He got out of the shower and dried himself off. Putting the towel around his waist, he walked back into his room. Sarah was standing with her back to him, peering out of the window, sunlight cutting the darkness that had collected in the room overnight. Whatever she saw or didn't see seemed to satisfy her and she dropped the curtain's edge. She turned to him and her eyes swept down the length of him, and then immediately back to lock with his eyes.

"I heard that you were awake. I was too." She gave him a bright smile, maybe the brightest he had seen her wear. "Did you get any sleep? It took me a minute…but once I went to sleep, I slept like a dead woman. I don't remember sleeping like that since…well, I don't remember."

Chuck tried to read her. Her features were relaxed and open. She did look rested. But this was the woman who confessed her intense yen for him late in the night. Maybe her late-night confession had helped her somehow? It hadn't helped him. In fact, it had tightened the knot of limbs and blankets.

She continued to smile at him and walked over to him. Her eyes dropped to his shoulder; a rivulet of water was running down onto his chest. She reached out stopped it with her thumb, wiping it away. It was extraordinarily intimate, breathtaking, yet such a small gesture. But she seemed almost oblivious to it. She stepped past him and sat down on the bed. She looked up at him, the bright smile still on her face. Was this the hot/cold thing again—but the weekend version, a version that evidently started hot, whereas the weekday version started cold?

Chuck's dream came back to him. He shook his head. Still wearing only his towel, he sat down next to Sarah on the bed.

"Sarah, I had bad dreams all night."

Concern covered her face. "Why? Are you worried about the people who are after you?"

"Well, yes, but I didn't dream about them."

"Who'd you dream about?"

"Um, well…"

She smirked at him good-naturedly, jokingly: "Did you dream about _me_?" She was flirting with him—and expecting him to realize that.

"Yes. I mean—well, yes."

She leaned close to him, batting her eyelashes deliberately, holding on to the joking tone of a moment before. "What was I wearing?' She asked this in a breathy voice.

"Nothing." Sarah's eyes grew large. "I mean—that I don't know. I didn't dream your clothes." Her eyes were still large. Chuck tried again.

"In my dream, you were really just talking. I could see only your face."

"That's a very chaste dream, Chuck. What was I saying?"

"I don't know. I couldn't really understand much of it."

"So, what was I doing, then?"

"Lying." Sarah's bright smile went dark. Her face, so open a moment before, closed.

She put her hands together in her lap and stared at the floor. Chuck couldn't think of any way of making it better without her help, so he got up, grabbed his clothes and went into the bathroom. When he came out dressed a few minutes later, Sarah was still sitting on the bed, still staring at the floor. She lifted her head and pointed her chin at him.

"Chuck, I know why you had that dream. Between Casey and me, you don't know what to believe. I told you that your engagement was an illusion. Casey told you, I'm guessing, that you need to be careful about me, careful of me. And I know _a lot_ …disturbingly so…about what Janet did. You must wonder how I know that.

"I decided last night that I want to tell you how I know that…but you need to understand something: I had planned not to revisit that story, or at least never to speak about it. But last night, I realized that there is something I want more than I want not to tell that story…"

Chuck studied her. She seemed completely sincere. Sincere, and a tinge desperate to be believed. Her hands reached out toward him and then she pulled them back.

"What do you want more than that?" He sat down beside her.

"You."

Silence filled the room. Neither spoke. That word, 'you', was like a stone dropped into a deep well. After a long silence, they both heard it finally strike water; they both heard the splash.

After another moment, Sarah elaborated. "I came in here last night and I talked to you while you slept." She paused, blushing slightly at her own admission. "I told you how much I wanted…to be in your bed. I also told you I couldn't be there because I had made promises to myself. But I felt the need to confess how I felt—even if 'confess' may be the wrong word, given that you were asleep." She flashed him a brief, awkward smile. She paused, marshaling her forces.

"I went back to bed. I continued to ache for you just as bad, maybe worse—but telling you that broke something loose in me. I cried for the first time in…well, I cried. I don't do that." Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke. "It's like I am…alive again. I've come back to the light—and I know I sort of had to be dragged here kicking and screaming, and that I haven't made it easy on you in any way—but I'm not going back into the numbing gray I've been in for so long, back to that achromatic world. You are color, Chuck, and light, and warmth, and I want all three. I want you." Sarah said the words and then seemed almost shocked at herself. She put her hand over her mouth for a moment, as if to stop herself from speaking. But then she took her hand from her mouth. She looked at Chuck in a way that declared that she would live with her declaration. "I'm tired of it always being six minutes till three in my life, Chuck. I don't want to be a figure in a Chirico painting. I am ready for time to start again."

It was Chuck's turn to blush deeply. Sarah added quickly, "I don't just _want_ you, Chuck, although I do _want_ you. I want _you_." She reached out to him. He took her hands in his and he raised one to his face. He kissed it. She gently freed her hands from his and wrapped them around his neck. She pulled him to her for a sequel to the epic kiss of yesterday. She pressed her lips to his and then opened them slightly. They both deepened the kiss. It was that rarest of things—a sequel that eclipsed the original.

Chuck thought of Casey's warning about climbing into bed with Sarah for a split second. He decided he'd risk it, risk that she wasn't trying to create an asset, but rather to express her genuine feelings for him. He would risk trusting her because he wanted to know her, to know _her_ , not just to know about her.

Sarah pushed him down on the bed as she deepened the kiss even more. Eventually, they both needed a moment. She pulled back slowly from his lips, gazing into his eyes. He had never seen their blue this close, nor when so filled with unedited emotion.

"You know, two people never lie down together without at least one getting up with feelings…"

She smiled at him, the smile small and shy at first but growing with resolve and…peace. "In this case, Chuck, one of us will lie down with feelings already."

"No."

"No?" Sarah's face started to crumble slightly, her resolved, peaceful smile threatened.

"No, two of us will lie down with feelings already." He pulled her down to him and then, keeping the kiss intact, he rolled her over gently, so that he was on top of her. She gazed up at him, delighted. A freedom and playfulness were in her response that hadn't been there before.

"Chuck?"

He was nuzzling her neck, overwhelmed by her scent and the unbelievable softness of her skin. "What?"

"Make me feel things, Chuck, lots and lots of things, make me feel them until I go crazy with feelings."

He rested his hand on her knee and slid it slowly upwards. "How's this?" His question was at once teasing and solicitous.

" _This_ is a very promising start…"

}o{

Chuck knew it had been a long time for him, and he could tell it had been a long time for her. They were new to each other and they were both so excited: so consumed by each other: so thrilled to discover each other: they lost the entire morning. Chuck counted it a morning well lost.

}o{

They finally got up and found their way to a diner down the street. They were both starving and ate huge breakfasts, laughing and talking. Their waiter got caught up in their high spirits. He teased them, and they teased him back. As they got up to leave, he told them that there were few things he liked better than serving a couple so obviously in love. They both colored and stammered; neither denied it, although neither could quite make eye contact with the other for a few minutes.

They left holding hands. They stopped in a department store and bought some clothes. Chuck got some plain, solid-colored t-shirts and jeans. Sarah bought a couple of pastel sundresses, blue and green, and some sandals. They each got a pair of large, dark sunglasses and broad-brimmed straw hats. It would be enough to make them harder to spot at the airport. They went back to the motel and changed. They gathered their things and headed back to Boca Raton—to Sally and the airport.

}o{

As the Land Rover merged with Interstate traffic, Sarah set the cruise control. She glanced over at Chuck, took a deep breath and, without further preamble, began to talk.

"My dad was a confidence man. My mom, too—well, not a confidence man, a confidence woman…Anyway, they were both cons…Give me a minute, Chuck, please, this isn't easy for me….They met on a con. My dad was to be the face of the con, in one sense, the person who talked to the mark, buttered him up, played him. My mom was the…distraction and the bait. Well, in the midst of everything, Mom distracted Dad and Dad buttered up Mom and by the time that con ended, they were a couple. They got married a few months later, maybe the only non-con thing either of them ever really managed.

"You see, they did, in their way, genuinely love each other. But somehow their professional pride got wrapped around their emotions, and Dad worried that Mom didn't love him or didn't love him as much as he loved her, and Mom got worried about the same, and so they started this strange dance—they're still in it—in which neither would come out and admit how he or she felt about the other.

"It was a bizarre life for a little girl. A home on the road, different towns, different cons, different names. Left alone for hours on end. Mixing with other cons, many of whom were dangerous or…worse. I mean, no one bothered me, but it was a strange group of people to grow up around. Carnies with brains and guns, Mom used to say.

"But the worst part of it was my parents and the way they treated each other, their refusal to ever admit how they felt, even though they managed somehow to stay a couple in all that grifting and lying and cheating.

"When I was around 12, they hooked a big fish—so big that the score could have set us up for life. The problem was that they had no time to assemble a team. The big fish just sort of leaped into view and they had to go into action. It required what I was telling you about with Janet, a long con, a long-term seduction. Dad could manage the other parts of the con—but Mom would have to be the seductress."

Sarah's face showed her pain and shame at the memory and the sharing of it. She went on.

"She didn't want to do it. Dad didn't want her to do it. (I understood all this fully only later, at the time all I could make out was their roiling misery.) But Mom wouldn't say that she didn't want to do it. She wanted Dad to tell her he didn't want her to do it. Dad wouldn't tell her he didn't want her to do it, he wanted Mom to tell him that she didn't want to do it. They went around and around like that, planning a con neither wanted because neither would tell the other what he or she did want.

"The closest they got to admitting it to each other was in the planning of the con. They worked hard to set it up so that Mom would work—by flirting, by promises, by getting nearer and then pulling back—to make the mark fall for her. But the plan was for the situations to always be controlled, for her to have an exit strategy, not only for the end of the con but for each meet with the mark. It was never supposed to involve Mom sleeping with the mark. Dad and Mom would never say why to each other, but it was clear that was not supposed to happen.

"Mom was…beautiful and smart and good at what she did. Dad was very good too. They hooked the mark and began to set up the big score. A few weeks went by, then a couple of months. Mom and Dad eventually sank all their money into the con, setting up fake businesses, buying Mom the right clothes to attract and keep attracting a spoiled, wealthy man…

"Finally, about four months in, it was almost time to spring the con, time for the payday. But the mark picked the day before everything was to happen to surprise Mom. He had been…waiting for her for a long time. He was supposed to take her to dinner—but when she got in the car, he headed out of town to a bed and breakfast: he had planned a surprise romantic getaway for the night. Mom was trapped. She did all she could—I believe this, although my dad still struggles with it—to keep anything from happening. She finally told the mark she was sick. The problem was that she had played that card a couple of times already and the mark began to get suspicious. She felt she was stuck—the mark was demanding, ready to leave, and the con would fall apart, or she could…do what he wanted. She decided to go through with it…and she did.

"I don't know what say about that, other than to say it makes my stomach ache still, but it was the choice she made. She slept with the mark for the sake of the con. The next day, Dad sprang the con and we walked away with a lot of money. Enough money to change our lives, to let us leave our carny existence. Buy a house. Become a normal family.

"But we never did. Neither Dad nor Mom could forget what happened to get that money. It became much more a curse than a blessing. Maybe the money would have been a curse no matter what, given that it was, in effect, stolen. But the features of the con seemed to make the money doubly cursed. Mom was despondent. Dad thought that what Mom had done proved that her heart wasn't really in the marriage, that she cared about the money more than us. Mom thought that she had made an awful sacrifice for the sake of her husband and her daughter. He couldn't forgive her and she couldn't forgive him. And neither of them could forgive themselves. I was drowning in their whirlpool of recrimination and self-recrimination.

"Mom started drinking. Everything fell apart at home. After a while, Dad left, and I left with him.

"They're still married, although I have no idea when they last saw each other. Mom still has the house and the money. She stopped drinking. I've started visiting her again. I've forgiven her, even if she won't forgive herself. I see my dad occasionally when his 'business' brings him nearby. He still refuses to talk about any of it.

"They've never gotten over what happened. I guess I haven't fully either. They can't let go of each other and they can't be together. They've lived that painful contradiction for over twenty years: not divorced, not married, miserably in love with each other but unable to do anything to alleviate the misery."

Silence. Broken only by the sound of passing cars.

Chuck started to speak but didn't realize how much the story had affected him. When he spoke, his voice sounded raspy, constricted.

"God, Sarah, I'm sorry. I can't…I can't even imagine that without it breaking my heart. I have no idea what it would be like to live it." He blinked several times.

She smiled sadly at him and reached over to rest her hand on his leg for a moment.

"So, that's how I know about the kind of thing that was done to you. I never participated in such a con—but I know all about them, and I still live in the ruins of one. Once I got older, my parents independently rehearsed its details to me over and over—how it was supposed to work, how it went wrong. Because of all that, I would never have been part of such a thing for the CIA if they had ever asked—and they didn't. They don't. I have also been taught a great deal about deep cover by the CIA and learned a lot about it doing it over the years. That's what I meant by 'experience'.

"I wanted to tell you this…I haven't told anyone. Ever. I needed to tell you because I wanted you to know how I knew what Janet was doing, what she did." Sarah sighed through all of this.

"I also needed to tell you because…because, after I told you how much I wanted you last night and went back to my bed…I realized that I had us in a whirlpool that was too much like the one I was in as a child. I…felt things for you that I didn't want to admit, and I was trying to keep you from admitting what you felt for me. And you were trying to understand if your trust in me was mistaken, and I was half-convinced that maybe it was, because that made it easier for me to keep from admitting what I felt…and so on…a whirlpool, circles within circles. I am sick to death of circles within circles.

"After I cried, I decided I had had enough of this. I'm still skittish as a colt, and I will need you to be patient with me, but I am going to trust you…I'm going to take you at face value, and try to let you do the same with me.

"The sad truth is, Chuck, I was raised by parents who instilled in me that doubt was more fundamental than trust. I guess it's easy enough to see how two cons would instill that in their daughter. And…things have happened to me since to make that seem unquestionable. My career in the CIA, things that happened during that career. Until you, Chuck. You see the world upside-down, given what I was raised to believe, but I've begun to wonder if you don't see it right-side up. I've begun to wonder if I've spent my life standing years on my head…

"I mean, there's a paradox in what I believed, what my parents instilled in me. Basically, _I trusted doubt_. I'm not saying that trusting doubt can't make sense in specific circumstances, but as a general attitude to life, doubt has started to seem…incoherent to me. Trust has to come before doubt. And if I'm going to trust, I'm going to trust _someone_ —not trust doubt. I'm going to trust you, Chuck. But I'm going to have to unlearn habits—and that takes time, just like acquiring them does. So, I'm going to relax my earlier demands. I'd like you to _Do_ , _Listen_ , and _Trust_ because I want to get you out of this unharmed. But I'm _asking_ now, not demanding, not daring. Please trust me, Chuck, trust me above all to trust you."

}o{

They pulled into the airport about an hour before Sally's flight was due to arrive. They went inside and checked to make sure it was on time. It was. They were wearing the clothes they had bought in Okeechobee. Chuck was gratified when Sarah reached out and took his hand to walk with him. They went through the main area in which travelers were arriving and meeting their friends and family or hustling on to ground transportation. Sarah still seemed relaxed as she had most of the day, except during the tale about her parents. They stopped in a coffee shop and got some coffee. He noticed that Sarah was careful to take a seat that gave her a commanding view of the arrival area. Chuck sipped his coffee and studied her as she sifted through the people standing or walking nearby.

What she had told him about her parents sank his spirits considerably. It had been an up and down sort of weekend. He was very, very happy about what had happened between them at the Blushing Pelican. In fact, he blushed himself just thinking about it. And he had been happy to know why Sarah had told him about her parents. But the story itself made his stomach hurt.

How could people tie themselves and the ones they loved into such torturous knots? Could Sarah straighten herself out after having been wound up in her parent's Cat's Cradle? He knew that he wanted to fall in love with her; he knew he might already have fallen in love with her. Could she, would she, love him back? The question nagged him, not because of what Casey had said, but because of what she had told him about herself. She was not playing him—but how much did she have to give? How much survived her childhood, and her time as an agent? But she seemed to have held onto herself somehow, some essential core of herself, through it all. Sarah was in there—under all the editing, the discipline, the self-denial, the pain, and the fear. He was convinced he had seen her today and was still seeing her.

She was stirring her coffee insistently and looking at him as he studied her. She submitted to his gaze without closing herself off, although he could see her inner struggle against years of living behind the frosted glass her eyes could so easily become.

Her eyes. Bluer than blue. Blue. It struck Chuck that blue was the chromatic color of which there were arguably the most shades, since it ran from a blue so pale it was almost white to a blue so dark it was almost black. Her eyes could run the whole gamut of shades, although the dominant shades were a pale ice blue—thankfully not in evidence so far today, although she had treated him to it enough already—and a rich electric blue—very much in evidence in the motel this morning. One could freeze you to death; the other could raise the dead. Her eyes.

Chuck made himself look away. She was affecting his breathing and instigating his imagination. Sally was due to arrive soon. He needed to be ready to see her.

This was a bizarre situation, he knew. Set aside the espionage stuff, the Vortex and all that. He was with a woman he had just made love to and with whom he had real hopes of…more, despite the obvious hurdles they faced. He was sure that they had more to talk about still, that there were further things they needed to know about each other. And, in this new and precarious position, they were about to meet Sally Hinto, his first love. She had wanted to try again, but Chuck would not. She wanted to try again now. How would she react to him? How would Sarah feel about Sally?

He sipped on his coffee and closed his eyes as he swallowed it. Sarah was studying him now. Was she thinking about Sally or about something else? He could tell that the tale of her parents' fateful con was not the only event to have discolored Sarah's view of romance, disastrous though it was.

Sarah stiffened. Chuck looked up. There, in the arrival area, stood Sally Hinto. She was unmistakable, a well-used backpack on her shoulder and a tote bag in her hand, and she was wearing her trademark: a beaten black Stetson.

}o{

Sarah watched Chuck sip again on his coffee. She could see thoughts were racing in his brown eyes. She knew they were thoughts of her—of their morning together, the lovemaking at the motel and the talking in the car.

She was jittery about meeting Sally, and the coffee wasn't helping with that, not even with all the stirring she had done trying to calm herself. Chuck was obviously still fond of Sally. Did Sally reciprocate those feelings? Sarah could tell they were friends, but she wondered if there had not been a strong hint of something more in Sally's concern and her willingness to drop everything to bring the Vortex to Chuck, to come and see Chuck.

Sarah swept her eyes back through the arrival area and stopped. Standing there, with a black hat on, was a woman who had to be Sally Hinto.

}o{

She was simply stunning, absurdly attractive. Her hair was inky black, blacker than the well-worn hat on her head—her hair made the hat seem grey. Her skin was beautiful, smooth and darkly luminous. She had eyes that somehow seemed blacker than her hair. They were so black that, at this distance, there was no way of telling that she had pupils.

Sally spotted Chuck when he waved at her. She flashed a wide smile, her teeth white and her lips very red. Sarah was not vain, but she was used to being the most attractive woman in the room. She was not the most attractive woman in the arrivals area. Sally was. She seemed to be so beautiful that she bent the light, as if the raven-nevermore blackness of her hair and her eyes commandeered and redirected the light around her.

She started toward them. She was neither tall nor short, but she was statuesque, and she was very light on her feet—or rather in her cowboy boots. She inspected Sarah as she approached. She seemed as struck by Sarah as Sarah was by her.

"Well, if it isn't Chuck Bartowski. Long time, no see, huh, _barn boy_?" Sally swooped in and gave Chuck a slightly more than friendly kiss on the lips. He looked surprised and uncomfortable. She looked like she would like more. Sarah waited to see what would happen.

"Hey, Sally. You look great. I mean, it's great to see you. Have a good flight?"

"Flights, plural. These weren't the easiest two places to connect by plane."

"Ah, Sally, this is Sarah. Sarah is my…" Sarah could tell that Chuck had no word he felt confident of in finishing that sentence, so it sort of fizzled. 'Friend' was too weak, 'lover' too new and much too revelatory. What should he say?

Sarah reached across the table and took his hand. It was done naturally and was not aimed at Sally, although Sally certainly took stock of it.

"…girlfriend. I'm Chuck's girlfriend." She smiled at Chuck and he smiled back, for a moment completely caught up in her gift of that word.

"Yeah, this is Sarah Walker, _my girlfriend_. She teaches at Commonwealth too."

Sally's smile waned but she showed no hostility or anger. There might have been a trace of disappointment, but it swept across her face for the briefest of instants and was gone.

"It's good to meet you, Sarah. I've been hoping Chuck would finally find…someone…again. He's too good a guy to be moldering away alone."

"Thanks, Sally, that's kind of you. I'm really glad to meet you." Sarah had to admit that she was. Sally had a presence about her—she was fully real, fully present where she stood. She had a commitment to the space she occupied, wherever that happened to be. She seemed to carry her territory with her.

"So how long will you be here?" Chuck asked.

Sarah saw Sally subtly recalibrating. "Not long. I'm really just a courier service today." She put the tote bag down and slid it across the floor to Chuck. "My return flight is in two hours. There's the Vortex. I worried one of the guards was going to take it from me when I passed through security back home, but I told him it was my barn door opener, and that I was taking it to get it repaired at a shop here, so he didn't bother with it. After all, it's just a bunch of electronics—the x-ray showed that. Not as threatening as a laptop."

"Thanks, Sally. This was way beyond the call of duty." Chuck stood and gave her a hug.

Sally's eyes revealed the degree to which she reveled in that hug. Sarah felt a strong twinge of jealousy. Sally wanted Chuck. There was no doubt about that. But Sally had shown no real sign of jealousy toward Sarah.

"Did you have any trouble getting away?" Chuck was concerned. "Will there be trouble when you get back?"

Sally looked thoughtful, puzzled. "No, no trouble coming. I tried to watch, to see if I was being followed, or if anyone took special notice of me. But no one seemed to. I don't have any reason to worry about things when I get back. Dad's fine; he says no one has been looking for him or you after the initial visit."

This struck Sarah as odd. Why would the team out west have made such a half-hearted effort to find the Vortex? Admittedly, it wasn't the same as getting the project itself, or getting Chuck, but it was obviously second-best. Maybe they really didn't understand what the Vortex was. Maybe they had no access to anyone who could figure that out. Maybe they were just…fishing. Sarah scanned the arrival area again. Still, no one, nothing grabbed her attention. The whole situation was beginning to seem bizarre.

"Do you two have time to grab something to eat with me here? There's not enough time for me to leave the airport, I don't think." Sally asked the question initially of Chuck, but turned to make it obvious that she was asking them both.

Chuck turned to Sarah, a question in his eyes. She smiled.

"Sure, Sally, we'd be glad to."

They found a place near the coffee shop and the hostess seated them. Sarah and Sally sat down, but Chuck didn't. "I'm going to go to the bathroom. Too much coffee."

Sarah saw that the bathroom was just across the wide hallway. She watched him as he walked to it and until he vanished from sight. The morning came back, came back to her, over her, the new possibilities of her future. Sally watched Sarah watch Chuck.

"He's extraordinary, you know," Sally mused, "genuinely, not-blowing-smoke-in-any-way extraordinary. He makes me think of Charles Lamb—and not just because they share a first name."

Once Sarah had seen Chuck reach the restroom safely, she had zoned out for a moment. Sally's words finally pierced the warm pink haze into which Sarah's mind had wandered. "Charles Lamb? Oh, the essayist? 'Dream-Children: A Reverie', right?"

"You know Lamb?" Sally asked.

"Not really. Just that one essay. I found it one day on the Internet and I've read it many times. It's beautiful, disturbing and comforting—all at once."

"Yes, it is." Sally paused a moment, thinking of the essay. "A beautiful testament to the peculiar regret that attends things we want but don't choose, or haven't yet chosen to have, like children," Sally stared speculatively at Sarah as Sarah drifted into back into reverie.

After a long moment of indulging Sarah, Sally went on. "I wasn't thinking of that essay, though; I was thinking of 'The Sanity of True Genius'. Chuck always makes me think of that essay—because he's brilliant but also the sanest man I know. His understanding of computers and of what they are and can do is on a different plane: he seems to see in 3D and in Technicolor what exists only in the form of black and white programs and equations for virtually everyone else, if it exists for them at all.

"But he knows so much else besides—a STEM guy who genuinely reveres the humanities and who spends a lot of his time reading and thinking about literature and history and poetry and philosophy. He's what Archilochus called a hedgehog-not a fox. 'The hedgehog knows one big thing; the fox knows many small ones.' And on top of all that, he is thoroughly decent, humble."

Sarah knew enough about Chuck now not to think this idle praise, but she was surprised at the depth and intensity of Sally's respect for Chuck.

"So, you're a big fan of Chuck's?"

"The biggest, present company possibly excluded, of course. I never wanted to give him up… but we just couldn't get our lives to mesh. I'll be frank, I still want to make that… _mesh_ …happen. But seeing you, and seeing Chuck look at you, tells me that my chance has passed me by again." Sally said all this in a measured and disappointed, but still not hostile, way.

"Why do you say that?" Sarah was pleased by Sally's confession, but also slightly puzzled.

"Because of the way he looked at you when you said, 'girlfriend'. That was a complete surrender of the Chuck Bartowski variety. I've now seen it twice, but the white flag never waved for me. It waved for Janet, may the Devil take her, and it's waving now for you. I don't know that it fully unfurled for her, but it is whipping in the breeze for you. You've got him, Sarah, forever, if you really want him."

Sally had said almost all of this while looking at the entrance to the restroom, waiting for Chuck to reappear. But she turned as she ended it and pushed her cowboy hat up her forehead. Doing so somehow brought the full force of her midnight eyes to bear on Sarah. Sarah met Sally's questioning gaze uneasily.

A waiter came and took their drink orders. Sarah ordered Chuck some water but asked the waiter to come back and check again when Chuck rejoined them.

"Are you implying that I don't really want him?" Sarah sounded a bit more defensive than she felt, probably because she still couldn't hold Sally's eyes. Sally pulled her lips inward, thinking.

"No, Sarah. And I don't mean to offend you. But I take it that 'girlfriend' and 'boyfriend' are new words for you two in this context. Am I right?" Sarah nodded.

"I don't know you, Sarah, but I'm good at people. Say it's a Sioux thing, mystical," Sally laughed, shaking her head and rolling her dark eyes, "or just say it comes from having spent a long time studying history, or just say I'm observant, whatever…But I can tell you're a woman who's been stumbling under burdens for a long time.

"I want you to ask yourself whether wanting Chuck is wanting another burden, or wanting to free yourself from some, maybe all, of your burdens." Sally's black eyes flashed as she finished, half convincing Sarah that Sally did have second sight, some mystical power.

"I'm not sure I understand that, Sally...What do you mean?" At that moment, Chuck came out of the restroom and looked sheepish when he noticed that both women were staring at him.

Sally turned back to Sarah. "I don't mean to be hard to understand. You're just not at the right time and place yet to understand me. You will be soon, I believe."

Chuck rejoined them, and the waiter came back. They ordered food and the conversation relocated to stories of Chuck and Sally at Stanford and in South Dakota. Sarah marveled at the genuine friendship between the two, especially given that they were once romantically involved and that one of them wanted to be again.

Sarah had to give Sally credit: she was a woman who knew herself, and a woman who knew how to stay in her own lane. Sarah was sure she wouldn't do as well if the situation were reversed.

By the time they finished eating, it was time for Sally to head to her departure gate. She left the tote bag with them. As she left, she gave Chuck a long hug and her goodbye was misty. Blinking tears back, she turned to Sarah and hugged her too.

"He's a keeper. He wants someone who wants a keeper, someone who wants a _partner_."

Sally whispered this quietly into Sarah's ear. The last word made Sarah go steely all over. Sally felt it and pulled back from the hug, her dark eyes again intently searching Sarah's face. For the first time, Sarah felt a wave of worry and even a hint of animosity from Sally. Sally took Sarah's hand and pulled her away from Chuck by a few yards.

"You said 'girlfriend'—did you _mean_ it?"

Sarah was panting slightly, an abrupt panic gripped her. She stammered: "Y…yes, yes, I meant it."

Sally's look was not exactly skeptical, but it certainly wasn't convinced either. "Ok, let's say you meant it, but what'd you mean by it? Do you even know?"

With that, Sally walked back to Chuck, whispered something in his ear, and got into the line for the security check. Once in line, she sought out Sarah and gazed into her eyes before turning to show her ID and to go through security.

Sarah wondered what Sally whispered to Chuck. Sarah's panic rose. She wasn't going to ruin the morning before she even got through the day, was she?


	7. Chapter 7: Kumran

**A/N1** Our title is part of a line from the Bon Iver song, "re: stacks". "Today is Kumran." Kumran (Qumran) is the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Bon Iver mentions it in "re: stacks" as a way of talking about a decisive moment in a person's life. As the song continues: "Everything that happens is from now on."

Two chapters to go after this one. Thanks for spending some of your time on this story. As always, I'd be glad to hear from you, so send me a review or PM.

Thanks to michaelfmx for wrestling this long, unruly chapter.

Don't own Chuck.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Saturday afternoon Sept. 2, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Boca Raton, Florida

The Airport

* * *

CHAPTER 7 Kumran

* * *

Chuck knew that Sally had said something to Sarah that had upset her. He had seen her tense in Sally's hug. He knew it wasn't the hug itself that had caused the problem. Sarah tried to smile when she turned back to him, but failed. She did, however, reach out her hand—but Chuck wasn't sure if that was because she wanted to hold his hand or because she wanted to keep him from asking about what had just happened.

He was almost certain Sally would not have said anything intending harm, but he also knew that Sally harbored thoughts of them getting back together again. He also knew that Sally was not someone who cut corners, cheated, to get her way. It seemed likely that she had upset Sarah unintentionally.

Sally had walked to him and whispered. "Remember this. She won't mean to hurt you."

}o{

They walked out of the airport and back to the Land Rover in silence. Chuck was carrying the tote bag with the Vortex in it. He put it in the back seat. Sarah took the wheel as usual. As they pulled out of the airport, she was carefully checking to see if anyone was following them. As far as she could tell, they were in the clear.

Chuck wanted to talk about what had happened with Sally, but Sally's warning had made his stomach tense up, made him anxious. Sarah had seemed lost in her own thoughts since they had gotten back in the car. Chuck started somewhere else.

"So, where to? Back to the Pelican?" Chuck had asked that before he thought about how it might sound. "Um…I meant as a place to sleep…to _stay_?"

Sarah turned her face to him and managed a smile. "No, not back to the Pelican, at least not right now. I think if we stay away from your apartment and your lab at school, we're probably ok. I was thinking we would swing back by my place and see if everything is still in order there. I also want to call Casey and see if he's caught wind of anything. Let's call Casey first."

Sarah steered into the parking lot of a small coffee shop, one that she had not stopped at before. When she stopped the car, she asked Chuck if he had ever been there before.

"No, I've not been in this part of town yet, really."

"Good. Keep your hat and sunglasses on. Get me an iced coffee, please." Sarah's voice was slightly strained. She picked up her burner phone as Chuck got out of the car.

When he got back, she had just finished the call. "Talked to Casey. There's not been anything happening on campus. Your lab had been locked and shows no signs of disturbance. Casey went to your apartment. As far as he could tell from the outside, it seemed undisturbed too. He drove around a few times and saw no evidence of anyone watching it.

"This is all strange, Chuck. Are they looking for you because of the project or for some other reason? Is this political espionage or corporate espionage? I was sure it was the first, although I also believe Janet was, at least initially, only involved in the second. It's all…strange, strange and increasingly puzzling."

She pushed a straw into her coffee and took a sip. She looked at a loss. "I just don't know exactly what is happening. I've never known any spies who _lollygagged_ quite like these seem to be doing. There's no lollygagging in spying, although sometimes you get stuck doing lots and lots of waiting. But these people don't even seem to be going to the trouble of waiting anywhere." She was now fully focused on the problem, her brow furrowed.

Chuck was glad to see that Sarah had regained some of her equilibrium.

"If my place is clear, I think I need to contact the CIA, Chuck. I need to know if anyone has any idea what's going on."

"Is that really necessary? Won't you have to tell them about me, about the project, everything?"

Chuck had not planned on divulging anything about the project until it was finished, the failsafe installed, everything ready. He was, frankly, as worried in some ways about his own government as anyone else's. He also didn't understand the shift with Sarah. And Casey's warning about Chuck possibly being her way back into the CIA—well, Chuck didn't believe that, but the whole situation was making less sense to him. He believed that what happened between them this morning was real. Despite Janet. Despite Casey. He didn't understand everything that was going on with Sarah. But he would hold onto this morning until someone pried it out of his cold, dead hands. They hadn't just gone through physical motions together this morning; they had not even just had sex; they had made love. True, neither of them had used the word 'love' specifically (although the waiter at breakfast had); true, Sarah had not referred to what happened between them that way. But in his heart, that was what Chuck believed it to be—and as much as he wanted her, he wouldn't have slept with her if he thought it wasn't that, or on a trajectory to that. It wasn't his style. (And since Tamara never happened, he could actually say that again!)

Chuck knew it could all go wrong. He was in as good a position as anyone to know that. But he didn't believe it would, at least he felt justified in hoping it would not go all wrong, and he was going to act out of that hope.

Sarah gazed at him, a gaze full of complications. "Tell you what. I still have a fancy email account of my own that I used during my CIA days. Let me get on it and send an email to an old CIA contact. I will ask him if he knows anything or can find out anything."

They climbed out of the Land Rover and both went into the coffee shop. It was the heat of the day in Boca Raton; not many people were out and about. The coffee shop was sparsely populated. They sat down and Chuck fired up his laptop. Once it was ready for use, he turned it to Sarah. She began typing.

}o{

Sarah knew that Chuck was on edge. She knew how much their morning meant to him because she knew how much it meant to her. To say that it had been the best morning of her life was a massive understatement. No one had ever touched her as Chuck had. She had never felt more truly intimate with another human being. She hadn't known it was possible. She had gotten up with feelings—deeper and more thorough and more permanent-feeling than the ones she had when they laid down. And she had strong feelings when she laid down; she could now admit that to herself. Her feelings now, in fact, were deeper and more thorough and felt more permanent than any she had ever known. And she had reveled in them until Sally had said the word 'partner': then her heart, still full to bursting, had skipped several beats. Her feelings didn't change, but they were suddenly ringed in fear. Bryce.

She shook her head gently. Now wasn't the time to relive that nightmare—a nightmare she tried constantly to keep from creeping back into her thoughts.

She had been right about one thing all along. The cost of feeling again, having these wonderful new feelings, would be that she would have to find her way past those old feelings. She had been numb because all her emotional energy was spent keeping those old feelings at bay. Chuck had radically redirected her emotional energy. And, as soon as her emotional back was turned, as it were, those old feelings tidal-waved into her mind. She fought them back—but the cost of doing so was retreating from Chuck, redirecting her redirected feelings. She knew he could tell that her feelings were no longer focused on him as they had been. Her feelings for him weren't gone, weren't going anywhere—how could they?—but she was no longer as emotionally available to him. The cost of beating back her memories of Bryce was forcing her feelings for Chuck to become harder to access. She didn't have enough energy to fight back her past with Bryce and be available to Chuck in the present.

Maybe it would be enough if she could just help him with all this. _Maybe_ —but enough for which one of them, him or her?

It would not be enough for her. To keep Chuck she was going to have to acknowledge what had happened with Bryce, own it, face it.

Maybe that price was just too high. Maybe.

She refocused: she needed to figure out what was going on with Chuck. She would reach out to an old contact at the CIA, an old contact who just happened to be the Director of the CIA. She had been his golden girl, his go-to agent, for many years. Their relationship was not friendly. It was what it was: professional. He had sometimes given her orders for which she could not forgive him, and for the execution of which she still had not forgiven herself.

 _Langston Graham_. He had recruited her himself. He had sent her to the Farm as a teenager. She'd finished at nineteen. In her early years as an agent, he had kept her close, groomed her, sent her to Harvard. Over her four years there, she performed several missions, almost always sent somewhere dangerous when her fellow students were going home for the holidays or to the beach for Spring Break.

He had made it clear to her (without ever saying so) that a condition of her remaining in school was that she perform these missions without complaint or resistance, and perform them successfully. That wild abnormality was Graham's tax on the normality of her undergraduate life. When she wasn't on missions, she kept her mind on her schoolwork, mainly as an attempt to keep from remembering earlier missions and to keep from pondering those to come. She hadn't dated. There had been no point. She had no time and any conversation would have been filled with lies. She wouldn't have wanted to talk about her childhood. She wasn't allowed to talk about her present.

She'd finished her degree—majoring in Italian and International Relations—with high marks. But Graham had her flying out of the country moments after her final class at Harvard. She hadn't even been able to attend graduation. She hadn't set foot on the campus again until she ran through it in the dark one night, chased through Cambridge by North Korean spies trying to kill her. She hadn't had time to reminisce—although she had a wild impulse to run through Emerson Hall and to salute the statue of Ralph Waldo Emerson kept there. She'd always liked that statue, liked Emerson. But there was really nothing to remember. She had passed through Harvard as she passed through her later life—as a ghost, a spook, a human shadow. Metaphysical detritus.

Most of her missions had been the real stuff of spy life, not movie fantasy. Long, boring hours spent waiting and watching. Cultivating contacts, marks, assets—most of them not particularly dangerous or interesting, but some of them connected to others who were. She had ferried documents, smuggled items, aided double agents. Often it all seemed little more than a bad night-shift job. But there were missions that were dangerous and missions on which Graham had, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps sometimes knowingly, forced her into situations where the lives of innocents depended on her making choices that were— _gray_. Gray at best. It wasn't like she was the only agent who had to make such choices. But they seemed to weigh on her in ways they didn't weigh on many of the others. She could force herself not to think about the choices, but she couldn't forget them or forgive them.

Most of the other agents seemed to find some sort of comfort or solace in the "Greater Good" talk that people like Graham sought refuge in. Maybe that talk occasionally made sense—but her experience of it was that it was a way of masking greed—for power, for money, for influence—under a fine sounding but an ultimately empty abstraction.

The soldier who threw himself on a grenade to save his buddies was not acting for the sake of an abstraction, he was acting for Tom and Dick and Harry, his very concrete, very real buddies. But so often, any attempt by Sarah to get clear about who or what constituted this "Greater Good' ended in a vague citation of "US interests", "foreign policy", "maintaining the balance of power". It was rarely about any actual people with actual names, actual histories, actual addresses.

She didn't think Graham an evil man, not exactly. He was what he was: a power-coveting career bureaucrat who treated what he found expedient as right, and who allowed the beliefs of other bureaucrats to serve as his standard when his judgment was unsure. The government was supersaturated with such men.

Sarah was certain Graham was behind her being teamed with Bryce. He knew she was disillusioned and ready to leave, and he had tried to keep her by assigning her a partner for the first time in her career. She had worked with other agents of course, but never really been partners with any, although there were a few, male and female, she had worked with more than once. But Graham had liked her being free of encumbrance so that she could be sent wherever he thought best: he liked his leashed wolf to be alone.

But he saw the burnout in her eyes eventually. The loneliness she was coming to find unbearable. She had no real friends. By nature, she was quiet, pensive, introverted. She could overcome her nature on missions, but when she returned, she almost always paid for that squelching of her nature by an even more intense quietness, pensiveness, and introversion.

At Harvard, that had been ok because she could fill those lonely hours with school work. Sitting alone in her DC apartment, however, she could do little but turn inward on herself. Replay her missions. Castigate herself for failures or breaches—of spy protocols or of her own values, which were often in conflict with each other, adding to her turmoil. It had become too much. And, so, Graham had given her Bryce. Or given her to Bryce. Anyway: _Bryce_.

Perhaps Graham was merely being avuncular, looking out for his golden girl and trying, in some distorted CIA way, to find her a boyfriend. Perhaps he was simply being patronizing, assuming that he knew better than she did what she needed. Maybe, worst of all, he was simply manipulating her, trying to keep her in the field for as long as he could, getting all that was left before burnout turned her to ash. She wasn't sure. But one day she was in his office and Bryce was there too and they had left as partners, almost as if Graham had pronounced them spy husband and spy wife—and husband and wife did become their normal cover...

Sarah shut this line of thought down. She was headed toward the nightmare—or it was headed toward her. She returned her full attention to Chuck's computer. Her email was up. She had gotten to it on autopilot, yet more proof of how ingrained some of her old habits still were. She was surprised to see that she had an email in her inbox. It was from _Graham_.

It was sent yesterday shortly before 7 pm, shortly before she had opened her door and found Chuck standing there. Nowadays, she didn't check this account daily. She mainly kept it out of some sense of nostalgia—and on the off-chance that she would one day need it.

She stared at the screen. The email had no subject line. There was only Graham's name. She felt dread grip the pit of her stomach. She opened the email.

 _Agent Walker,_

 _I need your help. I know you are no longer with the Agency. But the Agency needs you. I need you._

 _There is a new professor at Commonwealth, Chuck Bartowski. We have discovered that he has developed new encryption technology. We do not know if he has fully finished with his project, but it must not be allowed to fall into the hands of any foreign government or terrorist organization. We do not fully trust Bartowski. He has no questionable ties but he has been, on occasion, a critic of the US government. We are not entirely certain he will give the technology to us. We believe he will but we cannot wait to find out. He must not give it to anyone else or be allowed to sell it._

 _I am mounting a fake attack on his lab. I have dispatched a team to a location in South Dakota. Bartowski left a prototype of his project there. The team is supposed to stir up trouble there and, I hope, cause Bartowski's former girlfriend to return the prototype to him._

 _My intention is to scare Bartowski into giving the technology to us. Our best guess is that, with the resources of Commonwealth, he will have the encryption technology done soon. With the right pressure, which I have undertaken to apply, we believe Bartowski will prove easy to manipulate._

 _I believe that you could help our efforts. This is a matter of national security, of the greater good. I would like you to get to know Bartowski in the next day or two. He should be rattled from the 'attack'. I am not asking you to do anything more than to get to know him, offer him someone to talk to, steer him in the right direction._

 _I'm asking—but you also know that I could say that I am calling in a favor. You owe me one or two. But let's still just say that I am asking._

 _If you are not willing to do what I ask, then, besides being disappointed in you, I must demand that you stay away from Bartowski and do not interfere in what we are doing in any way. You know that we—that I—could create problems, quite serious problems for you._

 _Call me. You know the number. I can give you more details. I left a text on your phone to alert you to this message. We intend Bartowski no real harm—but we_ will _get the technology._

 _LG_

}o{

 _Son of a bitch_!

Sarah kept that to herself, but she couldn't keep a glance from darting toward Chuck. He was watching her but he had evidently not picked up on any signal. She grabbed her bag and dug her phone out. It was still disassembled. She put it back together and turned it back on. There, on her list of messages, was one from Graham. She had missed it. Chuck really did _affect_ her.

 _Email. Urgent._

She put her phone down. The coffee shop was going slowly in and out of focus. Damn it. She was _done_ with Graham and the CIA. And now she was caught…in a mess. Damn it.

Chuck, the man she…the man she...anyway, the man she had promised to protect…Now she had been…encouraged…to make him her asset, her mark. If she wasn't willing to do that, then she was to have nothing to do with him.

Graham could easily end her job at Commonwealth. He had been a major force in getting her hired and in seeing that she was able to turn field experience into academic credit, in effect securing her a Master's Degree in Italian. He hadn't been happy about it, but he did it.

But he could also do far worse now than getting her fired. If he knew she…felt something for Chuck, the fake attack could become a real attack on Chuck. Graham could ruin Chuck at Commonwealth. Graham was a manipulator of the first order: there was no telling how bad he could make things for each of them. He could try to bend her to his will by threatening Chuck. Maybe he wouldn't do that—but Sarah knew him well enough to know that she couldn't rule it out.

 _She had been better off numbly lecturing her undergrads_.

Hadn't she?

She logged out of her email. She got up in a daze and, without saying anything to Chuck, walked to the bathroom. Once inside, she splashed cold water on her face. She knew she was getting pulled back under last night. She was getting dragged under now. She had kept everything ordered for over a year, and then Chuck showed up; now disorder ruled the day. She glanced at herself in the mirror. She was bent slightly toward it. She still hadn't dried her face, and water was beading and dripping from her chin into the sink basin. She looked like she had been crying although she had not.

She grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser and dried her face. She needed to come to some sort of decision. What was she doing with Chuck? What was she willing to risk for him, on him? What was she going to do?

 _What question am I really asking myself, what decision am I trying to make?_

}o{

Chuck had watched Sarah's weird non-reaction to the email and her glance at her reassembled phone. She had left it. He reached across the table. Sarah had logged out of her email. Her phone screen was still lit up. He picked it up and looked. He saw a text from Langston Graham.

 _Email. Urgent_.

It had been sent last night at around the time Chuck left his lab. Langston Graham? Chuck knew that name; the memory of him made Chuck bristle.

He had met the man once some years ago at Stanford. Graham had recruited him—he wanted him to work for the CIA alongside working for Stanford. Graham wanted him to do research for the CIA but also to recruit from his best undergrads and grads students.

Chuck didn't feel like he was cut out even for that much cloak and dagger. He wasn't interested in serving two masters. He also wasn't interested in recruiting for the CIA. But most importantly he really didn't like Graham. He would have turned down anyone who asked, but he had to admit, in retrospect, that he had shown a certain contempt for Graham when he refused the man to his face. Again, in retrospect, that was probably not the most prudent way to have refused: Chuck should have just said "No, thank you" instead of mounting his high horse.

Why was Graham contacting Sarah? Why urgently? Could it be a coincidence that the message came when it came, just more or less synchronous with the break in at his lab? He thought again and harder this time about Casey's warning. Maybe Sarah was still CIA? Maybe not, but maybe she was trying to get back in? Of course, the message from Graham could be a coincidence—but Chuck's gut rejected that idea. No, something was going on. It seemed even more likely after Sarah's non-reaction. Would she have become unreadable unless there was something to read?

}o{

Sarah was still looking at herself in the mirror, as if the woman in the mirror could decide for her if given enough time.

What had Sally said to her about burdens and about Chuck?

 _Was Chuck going to be another burden, or was he going to be her way past some or all her burdens?_

Sarah began to understand what Sally was saying—although she had no idea how Sally had known to say it.

If she did what Graham asked, Chuck would be her asset, her mark, a burden for her to bear. Even when it ended, he would remain a burden on her heart and her conscience—two organs already overtaxed with burdens.

Sarah did have to decide. But it wasn't a decision about whether to give Chuck to Graham. Her decision was about _herself_. What did she want from her new life in Boca Raton? Was she just there to escape the CIA and to perhaps sweat out—in the suffocating humidity—the effects of her past? Or was she there to build a life, a new life, a different kind of life—a life of the sort that she hoped and believed Chuck could give her?

She left the bathroom and rejoined Chuck at the table. She could tell he had something on his mind, but he didn't seem like he was ready to share it yet. There was a slightly guarded look in his eyes. She picked up her phone and sent a text to Graham:

 _Bartowski is with me. He is frightened. Call off the 'attack' dogs. I will see what I can do. Give me 24-48 hours._

 _SW_

She had decided.

She got a response almost immediately.

 _Relieved to hear it. Expect results, as always._

 _LG_

}o{

Chuck could tell that Sarah had settled something with herself.

She had seemed unsettled since Sally had spoken to her at the airport. She picked up her phone and sent a brief text. She hadn't put her phone down before it pinged lightly. She had gotten a response. She read it and put the phone back in her bag.

"C'mon, Chuck. Let's go."

Chuck hesitated. What was she doing? Had the morning been forgotten or discounted so soon? She seemed settled now. But she wasn't the warm, playful woman who had been with him all morning until they said goodbye to Sally in the airport. Her eyes were more artic than electric blue.

He was tempted to just refuse to go. She had done the cold/hot, step back/step toward thing with him since he showed up at her office. Casey had warned him about it, about induced lovesickness. And, yes, he was lovesick. Maybe he had gotten out of bed with her this morning as her asset after all. If he was going to refuse, he needed to do it in a public place. Maybe he could approach this in stages.

"Where are we going, Sarah?" He peered into her eyes—arctic or electric? Arctic, still. That _hurt_ , it really hurt. Darkness filled Chuck's vision and he felt wobbly. His stomach heaved and his palms got sweaty. He hadn't felt like this since Janet ran from his apartment after finding him and Tamara.

Chuck had had enough.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea, Sarah. Maybe we need to part company right now, right here. I'm not sure…I'm not sure of your intentions. I don't want to be with a woman who's only with me when she chooses. I've been manipulated enough for love's sake, don't you think?" He stopped, squeezing his eyes shut before opening them and going on. "My claim on the crown of the King of Fools is already uncontestable." He looked at her with a piercing honesty. "Why should…Why should I go with you? _Where are you taking me, Sarah_?"

He knew she could hear the doubled meaning of his question. Other people in the coffee shop had picked up on the tension between them and were now watching them.

"I don't want to talk about this here, Chuck. But there's a lot we need to talk about. I'm asking you to trust me….again."

 _She won't mean to hurt you, Chuck._ Sally.

}o{

Sarah had put her hand out, slightly flexed, palm up, an invitation for Chuck to take it. She had a sudden feeling—influenced a little, she knew, by her sudden simultaneous awareness that the coffee shop was now watching them—a sudden feeling of standing on a razor's edge.

If Chuck didn't take her hand, it was all going to be over. Her previous decision would be moot. She wouldn't compel him or charm him into doing what she wanted.

If he took her hand, then she could follow through on her decision. The question of whether he would trust her—in the face of all he knew, in the face of her mysteriousness, her wildly mixed signals, her inconsistent reactions—that question now loomed as maybe the most important question of her life. She realized that it was so important because, as backward as it seemed, whether he could trust her in the face of all he knew was going to reveal more about him than it did about her. It would reveal whether he was the man to whom she could give her future, a man who believed in _her._

A man like Bryce would never take her hand in this situation. Detached, calculating, prudent in that steroidal spy way that she had been for years too, Bryce would have walked if he were in Chuck's shoes. Her father and mother would have walked. _If you know all the cons, you can't be conned_. They knew all the cons. Each would have walked—in something like the way they walked on each other. Doubt before trust. Make them _earn_ your trust.

And then she knew something she had not known before. She wanted Chuck's trust because _she trusted him_. She did. No denying it. She felt it to her toes. Maybe she had from the very beginning, and maybe that was what scared her, caused her to threaten him with a champagne flute, caused her flight from the Union, caused her back and forth with him. It almost certainly was what made possible her midnight confession and their…lovemaking ( _yes, that is what it was, so what it was_ ) this morning. It wasn't that she was trying to calculate whether she trusted him: she just did—from the very beginning. When she had no reason to, when he had not earned it. She just did. And for someone like her, who had lived her life, that should have been impossible. No one should have been able to evoke such trust from her, and her capacity for it should have been rusted beyond salvage. But he had evoked it and her capacity for trust wasn't beyond salvage. It could be brought back to life. It had been. It was touch-and-go for a while, but it had been brought back to life. Chuck had breathed life back into it. She trusted him to take her hand.

She trusted him, and it terrified her. She wanted his trust in return, the same kind of trust. _Trust at first sight_ : was that a meaningful possibility? Hadn't Chuck said that he was trying to tell her he trusted her when he approached her at the new faculty party? And hadn't he trusted her again and again when the evidence was against her, hadn't he kept coming back to her, even after she pushed him away, warmed her even after she'd gone cold?

She still held out her hand. Chuck was staring into her eyes. She felt her eyes shift, the quality of her gaze change as her heart finished reorienting, settled. She needed more time to think, to work this all out, but she knew she had changed. She thought she was fighting the change from when she met him, but she was fighting only to keep herself from realizing that she had already changed. Her gaze warmed and softened. Understanding all this mattered—but it mattered more to live it, _to live it right now_. She and Chuck could work on understanding it together after they dealt with Graham.

She still held out her hand. Chuck took it. She was illumined in the glow of his smile, freely given—a smile freely given, she knew, despite his confusion and questions.

}o{

Sarah's hand was extended, an embodied request: "Please trust me!" Her eyes shifted slightly, abruptly, back to electric blue—like the shift of an impossibly responsive mood ring. She had understood something, realized something. The shift in blue went with a shift in her bodily attitude. Without changing her position, she seemed vulnerable in a way that she hadn't a moment before. Whatever it was that she had realized, it was something about herself, and about herself in relation to him, because her vulnerability was a vulnerability _to him_.

She _trusted_ him. As soon as he knew that, he also knew why he was at that table, looking up at her—and why he had gone to her house, gone to Okeechobee, gone to the airport and…gone to bed with her. Because he trusted her with all that, trusted her with himself, with his…heart. All the questions he had just been asking masked that fundamental fact, were superficial: of course, he would go with her and, of course, he wouldn't run from her. He was with her. He was hers.

All his life he had waited for a moment like this and never had it, not with Sally, not with Janet. Let the scoffers scoff. Let the rom-com haters hate. He was with Sarah. _She doth teach the torches to burn bright_.

He took her hand, smiled, and stood beside her. He grabbed her and kissed her—to her great surprise, even a bit to his. After a moment, she kissed him back, hard. There was a ripple of pleased responses and slow claps from the coffee drinkers around them. Sarah pulled back, her color rising.

"Well, this is a little uncomfortable…"

Chuck, normally reticent about PDA, simply smiled. "Pretty comfortable for me…Just saying"

"Oh, I didn't mean the _kiss_ , Chuck—only the circumstances." She leaned in close as she said that since their audience was still watching.

"I know—and normally I would agree with you, except I'm finding that kisses from Sarah Walker are so earth-shaking that I'm unwilling to pass up on any, if I can help it."

"'Earth-shaking', huh? Homeric?" She grinned at him cheekily, forgetting their audience. "I'm not sure anyone has had recourse to Homer before in describing my kisses. I rather like your kisses too, _you great-souled man_.

"Let's go, we need to talk, Chuck."

They left the coffee shop and climbed back into the Land Rover.

}o{

Sarah drove them back to her house. It was getting late in the afternoon. The shadow of her massive live oak tree lay dark and heavy across her house. When got out of the car, and climbed onto the porch, they could feel the difference in temperature. It was noticeably cooler on the porch.

"Sit down out here, Chuck. I think I still have some lemonade I made yesterday. Would you like a glass?" Chuck nodded and took a seat in one of the old metal lawn chairs Sarah had on the porch, leaving the rocker for her. Chuck was both eager for the coming conversation and anxious about it. It now seemed clear that Graham had emailed Sarah about him. She had texted Graham back and got a response. He trusted her—but he was curious and worried. He didn't think she would do anything except what she thought best for him. What would that be, though? What was going on?

Sarah came back and handed Chuck a tall glass of lemonade. She had one for herself. She sat down in the rocking chair, smiling at him to acknowledge his remembering that it was her chair. Her smile also seemed to say that it would have been fine with her if he had chosen to sit in it.

"I have several things I need to tell you. Each is difficult in its own way. I want to start by…telling you about my old partner, Bryce Larkin."

"Wait— _Bryce Larkin_? Didn't he go to Stanford? Track guy, gymnast, hunk?"

Sarah nodded but looked shocked. "You knew each other?"

"Yeah, he was a couple of years behind me, school-wise, because I started at Stanford without ever finishing high school. I was just starting as a grad student when he was a freshman, but we were the same age. He was in a class for which I was the teaching assistant."

"You're kidding me."

"No. But he's an… _accountant_. At least, that's the last I heard. We weren't close friends or anything. So, he was a spy…became a spy?"

"Yes, he was recruited at Stanford. I should have realized that you two might have known one another."

"Not really. Big school. We ran in…different circles. We were…are, I'm guessing…still pretty different men." Chuck looked down at his lemonade and then lifted it to his mouth and took a drink.

Sarah still seemed flustered by the fact that he knew Bryce.

Chuck went on, "So you two were partners? For a…long time?"

"Not really. About two years. Chuck, Bryce is…dead."

"Oh, sorry. It must have been awful to lose a partner." Chuck turned sympathetically toward her.

"It is. But there is…more to it than that. I guess I should just try to tell the story. I need you to hear it, Chuck." Sarah started. The story came in fits and starts.

}o{

"I had been in the CIA already for a long time when Bryce became my partner. For years, I had been a solitary agent. The CIA director, Graham, considered me his go-to agent, his personal…trouble shooter. Don't get too excited by that. It still meant that most of the time I was little more than an undercover cop who worked in foreign cities. Most of the work was the boring work that spies spend their work time doing. Watching, listening, trailing. Certainly, there were missions that were like the ones in the books or on TV, glamorous or deadly or politically consequential. I've done things of which I'm very proud, Chuck. But I've also done things of which I'm bitterly ashamed, things I will…tell you about or try to…down the road. We'll have time…the time I'll need…for those talks.

"I had become disenchanted with the job, with Graham, with all of it, and I wanted out. Graham caught on. I guess he thought the problem was that I was lonely. Maybe it was—maybe it was part of the problem. He assigned Bryce to me and would brook no debate about it. At first, Graham kept finding us dreamy sorts of assignments—tropical paradise settings, little danger, usually an assignment that required us to play the part of a married couple.

"Why I didn't see it at the time remains a puzzle to me. It should have been obvious. Graham was setting me up to fall for Bryce. I now suspect he even told Bryce that was what he was doing, encouraged Bryce to make a play for me, probably assuring him I was ripe for the…plucking. Anyway, Bryce did the job. By our second mission of that sort, I thought I was falling for him. I did fall into bed with him.

"I know that men think I'm beautiful. As a spy, that was to my advantage in some ways and to my disadvantage in others. I could influence marks or assets reasonably easily. The cost was that they were always pushing for more, and I was always having to find ways to avoid it. If I was captured, I knew ahead of time what kind of…torture was most likely to be my fate. Thank God, the only two times I was captured I was rescued right away. It had been obvious what even another hour would have meant for me, if I couldn't have found a way to free myself—and I doubt I could have done so in either case. I was lucky. I knew other attractive female agents who weren't so lucky.

"Anyway, I know that men think I'm beautiful. But where love is concerned, beauty can be as tricky as wealth. It's hard to know why men who are interested in you are really interested. Do they know you, or just see you? I guess I don't have to tell you that men are slaves to their eyes in almost the same way beagles are to their noses? I don't mean that women can't also be that way—God knows we can. But…

"Sorry, I'm drifting…I guess...I really don't want to have to tell you this story.

"Things with Bryce were good…for a while. Then I began to think about leaving the Agency again, this time to have a family—with Bryce. I hugged that thought close for a long time without saying anything to him about it. Graham gave me an additional push, because once he felt like Bryce and I were together, he started changing the venues and types of missions.

"Soon we were in grimy eastern European cities, working long weeks of surveillance, making deals in dark bars, chasing bad guys through sewage near the docks. All that risk and darkness made me start thinking even more seriously about getting out and having a family. Bryce seemed genuinely to care for me. I thought he would at least be willing to talk about it. But before I could even begin a conversation with him about it, he began to change, to act…differently.

"He became distant, more distant, really. He didn't do intimacy. He insisted that he was in control of the missions and that he was, in effect, my handler, and that I was his asset. Our…time together…changed. It had always been, well, not much about intimacy or communication or sharing but mostly about need. It now became brief and rushed and rare. Bryce no longer even acknowledged that I had my own needs. We were together, when we were, to serve his. He became rough and demanding. I thought maybe he had understood what I was hoping for and was trying to make it clear to me that he didn't share my hopes—but he could have just told me that. I had finally had enough of it. I gave up on a future for us. I still thought I…loved him. But I couldn't go on. I contacted Graham and asked to go back to my old status, to go back to being alone.

"Graham seemed surprised, puzzled. It turned out that it hadn't been Graham who'd made things worse for us, sent us to all these hellhole assignments. Bryce had lobbied for them, claiming that he and I both wanted them. Graham never questioned Bryce or said anything to me about it.

"I began to wonder what was going on. I started watching Bryce as much as I could without him detecting what I was doing. His behavior was suspicious. He had always been the recon person on our team—that meant he went out without me a lot, to look over drop sites and meeting places and so on.

"One day, I followed him. He was on a meet instead of doing recon in preparation for one. I knew the person he met, a dangerous high-ranking player in an organization of rogue spies known as Fulcrum. They didn't seem to meet as adversaries or to make a deal. The man from Fulcrum seemed to be Bryce's handler. I began to suspect that Bryce had been a double agent all along, or had become one at some point, that he was himself a member of Fulcrum. I played a dangerous game for the next couple of days. I kept him at bay (I couldn't stand the thought of him touching me but, luckily, he didn't seem that interested) and I kept tabs on him as well as I could. I finally overheard a conversation he had on his cell when he thought I couldn't hear. The conversation confirmed my suspicion. He was a double-agent. But then I realized that the conversation had turned to me. I had been seen following Bryce to meet with his Fulcrum handler. Bryce, I realized, had been ordered to kill me.

"I honestly didn't think he would do it, could do it. That night, I pretended to be sick so that I could go to bed early. He knew I had followed him, so he was watchful. But he had no idea that I had heard the phone call.

"I managed to get into bed with one of my knives. He didn't know I'd done it. He got in bed beside me. I regulated my breathing and rolled over, exposing my back to him. I knew that we couldn't lie like that forever. If he was going to try something, he would do it sooner rather than later. I…gave him the chance.

"At first, I thought I was right—that he wouldn't do it. But then I felt him get out of bed. He moved as silently as he could. If I hadn't been alerted to what he was doing, I doubt I would've had a chance. I heard him get to the chair where he'd placed his shoulder holster. The steel-on-steel sound of him twisting his silencer on was barely audible—but I knew that sound. I'd made it a few times myself in preparation for…

"Anyway, I was praying I was wrong, that he couldn't do it. Graham knew nothing about the situation really. Maybe I could turn Bryce again. I held out no hope for us, of course, but I did hope that I wouldn't be forced to kill my…lover, the man with whom I'd hoped to leave the CIA.

"Bryce padded back toward me. He stood by his side of the bed. I knew he was aiming the silenced pistol at me. He was going to execute me. I'd worked with him long enough that I had come to know his breathing when he pulled a trigger. I heard him take a slow deep breath and start to exhale it slowly. He was about to squeeze the trigger, maybe he was squeezing it.

"I whirled over and threw my knife. I caught him in the throat, severing an artery. There was…a geyser of blood, immediately soaking his side of the bed. He fell. I got to him just as his eyes fixed. I straddled his body, my knees in his pooling blood…I demanded to know why he'd done it. He said nothing. He just died."

}o{

They sat in silence for a long time when Sarah finished her story.

What words were there?

Chuck reached over and took her lemonade out of her hand. She was squeezing the glass so tightly he feared she would break it. When he got the lemonade out of her hand, he scooted his metal chair closer to her. He kept hold of her hand, chilled both by the lemonade and the story.

He pulled her gently into his lap. She moved to him and put her arms around his neck. She buried her face in his shoulder and she began to cry. There were no great, wrenching sobs. In many ways her quiet, intense tears were worse—more focused, a steady drip-drip-drop of slow-thawing agony. She had held onto this story, to this pain, for a long time, Chuck knew. Held it cold against her heart. He guessed she had held onto it so tightly that in a sense she couldn't begin to reckon with it, because she could gain no distance or perspective on it. It was just a vast ice floe of raw pain threatening to suffocate her—a thick, translucent sheet of anger and disappointment and fear and betrayal and guilt.

He said nothing to her. He held her. His shirt became damp, then wet. The late afternoon passed into evening: the shadow of the umbrageous live oak lengthening and finally dispersing into the general gloom as the sun slowly sank. After a while, he realized that Sarah had fallen asleep. He took her into her bedroom and put her in her bed. She was in a deep sleep. She did not awaken as he took off her shoes and tucked her beneath the soft blue blanket. But just as he let go of the blanket, she trembled. Her hand seemed to clutch at his for a moment. Then she was deeply asleep once more. He grabbed the heavy blanket folded at the foot of the bed and unfolded it. There was a white cross on the blanket, placed in the middle of a thick red stripe: a Swiss Army red cross blanket, as he had suspected on his first visit. He got in bed beside her, careful to stay on top of the blue blanket she was under, and then he covered them both with the red cross blanket. He laid there on his back staring at the ceiling. It had been quite a day. Sarah Walker had been naked in his arms, albeit in two different ways, as the day began and as it ended.

They still hadn't talked about Graham's email or Sarah's response. Tomorrow would be soon enough. Sarah didn't seem concerned that anyone was after him any longer. He wondered why that was. But if she was ok with it, he was too. Tomorrow. He trusted her. God help him, he did.

* * *

 **AN2** In an interview, Bon Iver's mother said the following about "re: stacks": "To me…it is about going through the sadness, taking some of it with you and being made whole because of it…"


	8. Chapter 8: Purgatory to Paradise

**A/N** A bit of a breather before we finish. Thanks for reading and for responding. There's been a glitch with reviews; I haven't seen any for Chap 7. I will catch up on responses once the reviews are available.

We are on pace to finish by Valentine's Day. Yay!

Thanks to michaelfmx for his beta work.

Don't own Chuck.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Sunday, September 3, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Boca Raton, Florida

Sarah's house

* * *

CHAPTER 8 Purgatory to Paradise

* * *

Sarah awoke to an inky and grumbling Florida thunderstorm. The rain was blown by heavy winds that made the sound of it inconsistent, now splashing in bucketsful against the house, now not, as the wind tossed the heavy curtains of water. Her room lit up with the flash of lightning. She heard thunder.

She felt warm and comfortable and safe beneath her blankets and she snuggled into them. _Wait? How did I get here?_

She remembered. She had told Chuck her awful story, the second one in the span of a day, and then he had held her. She must have fallen asleep on his lap. He'd put her to bed. She then realized that the other side of the bed was mussed. She put her hand out—it was cool to the touch. Another flash of light, another peal of thunder. Sarah reluctantly got out from beneath the covers and walked to the window. She looked out at the morning, dark gray and wet.

She still hadn't entirely gotten used to these storms. They didn't frighten her, but they affected her. They were a reminder of how large and powerful and indifferent the world could be, and of her limited ability to understand and attempt to cope with that world. She could see the creek behind her house was badly swollen, engorged with muddy water, rushing, careening sloppily inside its banks.

She felt Chuck enter the room. She turned from the window. He was suddenly lit up by a flash of lightning outside. His hair was mussed, like the blankets on the bed, his curls pushed a bit more to one side than the other. He gave her a tentative, lopsided grin. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. He held out a steaming mug. "Coffee?"

She walked to him and took the mug. She held it in both hands, closed her eyes, and allowed the aroma of the freshly brewed coffee to envelop her. Another lightning flash. The warm aroma was a counterpoint to the dark thunderclap outside. She sipped it and hummed her approval. She grasped the mug by the handle and freed her other hand.

She reached out and put her hand around the back of Chuck's neck and pulled his lips to hers. She could taste the coffee on his lips and knew he could taste it on hers. Lightning. Thunder. She pulled back from the kiss and sought out his eyes.

"Thank you for last night. I never thought I would tell anyone that story. I told the clinical, spy version to Graham when I called him to report what had happened. I wrote it down as part of the investigation. But I never…told…it to anyone. Maybe not even to myself."

Her hand was still resting on Chuck's neck. He reached up and gently pulled it around to his mouth. He kissed the palm of her hand a couple of times. She kept her hand joined to his after the kisses.

"Was there trouble for you after it happened?"

"No, luckily, there was enough evidence in Bryce's phone, on his computer and at his apartment back in DC for my story to be borne out.

"Graham was…embarrassed, I guess. He did all he could to keep me at the Agency, but he knew I was done. I stayed on for a while but then started preparing to leave. He helped—again, he felt bad about it all, even if he didn't want me to go. I believe he mainly felt bad that he'd been played. He was less concerned with me. But, still, he helped me. He worked with Harvard to get me academic credit for my field experience. They gave me some tests and eventually awarded me my Master's. Maybe, if this book I am writing goes well, I can submit it as a thesis and get my Doctorate. I have all the coursework I need."

Chuck took the coffee cup and took a sip. "What're you writing about?"

"Dante's _Divine Comedy_ —specifically on _Purgatory_."

"Oh, yeah, right, Purgatory is the place of waiting, where those who are guilty of the Deadly Sins purge themselves of what they've done so that they can eventually enter Paradise _,_ right?"

"Right." Sarah nodded, and took the cup back and took another sip of coffee, hearing the rain continue to fall.

Chuck grinned. "Cheerier than _Inferno_ , I guess, although less cheery than _Paradise_. Say, it's been years since I read it—and I read it only in translation, of course—but isn't Purgatory like, a mountain, with seven terraces, Pride on the bottom terrace and Lust on the top?"

"Good memory, yes. Dante thought that all the sins were related to love, forms of love—excessive or deficient or corrupted."

"Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember that. It always seemed right to me—or at least as good an account of wrong-doing as I know."

Chuck looked off into space for a moment, considering it. Sarah picked up the discussion, enjoying getting to share this with Chuck.

"I suppose one reason I find thinking about Purgatory interesting is my childhood. Looking back on it, I realized that one of the things that makes conning other people so shameful is that it uses people's love against them—increasing it when it's already excessive, like the proud, decreasing it where it's deficient, like the slothful or indolent, or corrupting it further when it is already corrupt, in the greedy or lustful. The real secret to a good con is figuring out what people love with a love that is in some way...improper—and then playing on that improper love. It's much the same with spying, with marks and assets."

The silence that settled over them both broke eventually-another flash of lightning and peal of thunder.

Sarah kept Chuck's hand in hers and they walked into the kitchen. Sarah could see that Chuck had been at work. The tote bag Sally brought was on the floor and a metal device, about the size of a cell phone but thicker and heavier, was on the table, its back separated from its front. The Vortex. She had to admit: it looked like a garage door opener.

She put her coffee down on the table and then sat herself down in one of the chairs. "So, that's…"

Chuck bent formally from the waist, extending his arm slowly toward the device, and in his best ringmaster's voice proclaimed: "…The Mighty Vortex!"

He had no more than finished when the Vortex chirped, a lazy, fading chirp—an audible anti-climax. Sarah began to laugh and Chuck joined her. She knew it wasn't as funny as she found it, but she knew she needed that laugh. It washed away the vestiges of the story from the night before.

Chuck sat down in a chair and looked at her. "So, Sarah, why are we back here? Shouldn't we be back in Okeechobee or somewhere on the road, you know, driving North by Northwest or something? Me, Roger Thornhill—you, Eve Kendall? Why are we here?"

"Thank you, Chuck, for trusting me and for letting me talk about me last night, about my past, and not our present. I needed to do that. But, you're right, now we need to think about the present. It turns out that around the time you visited my office Friday night, I got an email from Graham.

"He orchestrated the 'attack' on your lab and he sent the team to South Dakota. He wanted to scare the Hintos into bringing this," she gestured to the Vortex, "to you. The CIA—or maybe I should say _Graham_ —wants the project and the Vortex. I guess Graham wanted it all here with you hoping that you'll just give it all to him, that he won't have to…take it.

"All of this, the break-in, the dark SUVs, the intimidation of the Hintos, all of this has been to scare you into giving him the project. He wants it, but—given my knowledge of him—he also wants you to give it to him, and wants you to be grateful to him, I think. He wants to…humble and humiliate you. I got that from the tone of his email.

"He got in touch with me to see if I would be willing to…cultivate…your willingness to give the project up. So, yesterday, when I saw the email at the coffee shop, I told him I would and asked for more time—I have until tomorrow. So, I knew we wouldn't be bothered if we came back here last night."

Chuck said nothing. She knew he had become angry. Furious,even. But he was controlling it.

"Did I ever tell you I met your…boss?"

"No, and it's _former boss_. How did that happen?"

"He came to Stanford when I was on the faculty and tried to recruit me. I didn't like the guy then and I refused. I made sure I did so in a way that…expressed my dislike for the man." Chuck's teeth clenched for a moment. "I'm not proud of the way I reacted. But I still believe I was right to refuse him and to dislike him. I just shouldn't have flaunted that dislike. It was unnecessary."

"Well, Chuck, Graham is my former boss. He's not my former friend. If you two had a run-in and you angered him, then I understand part of why he's doing this—he's putting you in your place, trying to force you to be grateful to him. He really is a son of a bitch.

"Anyway, he and I had a professional relationship, not a personal one. Although, as I said, Graham felt that our professional relationship gave him permission to manipulate my personal relationships. I understand your dislike of the man. Had I met him at a less impressionable age, or felt less professionally indebted to him, I suspect I would've disliked him from the beginning too. I came to dislike him and I have to say I dislike him heartily right now."

Chuck's fury was on simmer. "But, Sarah, if he is your former boss, why did you agree to do what he wanted?"

"I didn't, Chuck, I just pretended to. I bought us time. We need figure out a plan to get you out of this, so we can get on with our lives…together. By tomorrow night, we have to have a way out."

The fury vanished from Chuck's face altogether—at least for a moment. " _Our lives_ _together_?" Outside, a silence became noticeable; there was a break in the clouds; sunlight shafted into the kitchen through the sink window.

"Yes, Chuck, but we'll talk more about that later," she couldn't keep a grin from her face.

Chuck grinned too, but then she saw him think of something and his expression darkened a little. "Ok. But when you got up yesterday, at the coffee shop, after you saw the email, what was that all about?"

"That was me coming to terms _with myself_ —about you, and about you and me. It was about me realizing that I do trust you. I can't give a reason, except to say that you seem worth trusting, and my reason for that is that I trust you. And that's kind of circular logic, I get that. But It's a _good_ circle—it's real and anyway it's _my_ circle. I just had to recognize that that is where I am, in that circle, and that I'm there, _with you._ Because, unless I'm very much confused, you're in that circle too, _with me_?" She paused; Chuck nodded happily.

Sarah went on. "I trusted you from the moment I saw you, the moment we saw each other, at the new faculty party. I know that now. It's why I reacted as I did there, and why I ran from you at the Union. You couldn't have scared me so much, unsettled me so much, without prompting that kind of deep, immediate change. I dared you to trust me because I already dared to trust you. I knew when I saw your eyes for the first time, that if I allowed myself to do that a few more times, I would start feeling things, telling you…things." She smiled at herself, shook her head. "I wasn't wrong about that, it turns out. I was just wrong to be so terrified of it. So, are you in that circle of trust with me, Chuck?"

Chuck grinned again—a large, happy, concessive grin. "Yeah." He was nodding his head too.

"Then I need you to stop being angry with Graham and start plotting to stop him. I should tell you that he _could_ do a lot more than cost us both our jobs. He could do all sorts of things—including kidnapping you and throwing you in a bunker to force you to give up the project, even finish it for him. He could let old enemies of mine—Fulcrum agents, for example—know where I am.

"I don't know that he would resort to such tactics. But there is no way of knowing for sure. He has…played hardball in the past; sometimes, I was his…enforcer. I was the person who played hardball for Graham." Sarah stopped, and her gaze drifted to the wall. She swallowed hard. Then she looked back at Chuck, scanning his face for a reaction. He showed no sign of being upset or bothered by what she said. She sighed quietly in relief. "Do you have any ideas, Chuck?"

Chuck stared at the Vortex on the table. He sipped from the coffee. Sipped again. He drummed his fingers on the table for a few minutes. Stopped. Drummed again. All the while, he continued to stare at the Vortex.

"Sarah, do you have a grill?" Chuck asked, a small smile beginning in one corner of his mouth and then stretching across it all the way to the other.

"Yeah," Sarah answered, surprised by the question. "The previous owners actually built a brick grill in the backyard. I haven't used it. I don't entertain." She cast her eyes down, sure that his time in her house had made that clear.

"Well, you make a fine lemonade. I say you contact Graham and invite him to a Boca Raton Labor Day Cookout. We'll see if we can't find something to burn while he's here. We could roast a weenie…" Chuck's eyes narrowed above his smile.

"Can you think of some friends you might invite over? It would be best, I think, if the gang were all here, so to speak. It will make things more confusing for Graham, harder for him to misbehave."

"I suppose I could invite Carina. She's the tall redhead who was sitting with me in the Union the…ah…the other day." Chuck nodded. "We could invite Morgan and Alex, I guess. You know them, right?" Chuck nodded. "I mean, I like them and I think they like me, although I am not sure it would be quite right to call us friends. And Casey and his wife and daughter."

"That sounds great. Why don't you make some phone calls? I need to think for a few more minutes, and once we know who's coming, we can work out a plan."

Sarah smiled at Chuck. The mere thought of having people over before would have sent her into a panic. It still made her a little jumpy. But it also seemed like it might be…fun. To be with those folks and with Chuck. Then she remembered that Graham would be there too—because, she knew, he would come if she dangled Chuck and the project in front of him.

"Tell you what," Chuck said, getting up and looking out through the kitchen window at the emerging sun turning the storm's leftovers into steam, "I'll go outside and make sure the grill is working. Yes, sir, we're going to have a real Boca Raton Labor Day Cookout, _CIA Style_."

}o{

The next couple of hours Chuck spent outside, repairing and prepping the grill. He was good with his hands and found that the time spent fixing, cleaning and adjusting the grill helped him clear his head. Sarah had made her phone calls. Everyone accepted. Chuck could tell that made her nervous. He was sure—although she had not said so—that he was the first person she had ever allowed into her house. Now, everyone was coming, as it were: most notably Langston Graham and (no doubt) his espionage entourage.

Sarah had reported the result of her phone calls when she brought Chuck out a glass of ice water. He drank it thirstily. She told him she had also taken his clothes from Friday and washed them. They were now drying. That was good because the clothes he'd been wearing for the last couple of days were getting foul and were soaked with sweat.

Chuck was pleased that there was also an old, longish picnic table on the back section of the porch. It would work well for tomorrow's event. Chuck finally finished with the grill and went inside. Sarah had his clean clothes folded on her bed. She'd left for the store to get supplies an hour ago. He stripped down and put his sweaty clothes in as discreet and unobtrusive a pile as possible. He got into the shower and stood under the water.

He was nervous about the showdown he was planning with Graham, but he knew it was unavoidable. At some level, he must have foreknown that he and Graham might end up like this. Their meeting at Stanford had ended without a resolution. It was like a cliff-hanger ending, as if _To Be Continued_ had been in subtitles beneath the two of them during their hostile final handshake.

Chuck got out of the shower and began to towel off. He was rubbing his hair with the towel when he heard a deep, long sigh. He turned, lifting the towel as he continued rubbing his hair so that he could see. Sarah was standing in the door of the bathroom gazing at him eagerly and unapologetically.

"I put the groceries away. We can make some lunch in a little bit but, I confess, I'm not hungry—well, not for lunch…" She licked her lips unmistakably and winked at him, open-and-shut blue.

"Why, Professor Walker, I'm shocked that you, _a Dante scholar_ , a woman of letters, could make so carnal a suggestion. I would have imagined you to have risen well above the flesh, to dwell in a realm of pure spirit." Chuck had tucked the towel around his waist and taken on a lecturer's tone. He was gesturing grandly but nearly nakedly toward the ceiling, the realm, presumably, of pure spirit.

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Tell you what, Professor Bartowski," she sighed as she began to slowly undo the small blue buttons on her blue blouse, "if, once I open my blouse, you believe you can remain in the realm of pure spirit, I will join you there." She finished with her buttons and her blouse hung open, her bra light blue beneath the flash of her electric eyes.

Chuck turned bright red. She could see that he was reacting…all over. His breath caught in his throat. "Well," he offered finally when he had found his voice, "I _firmly_ believe that the…material is the vehicle of the spiritual."

Sarah smirked her satisfaction, glancing at the tented testament to his firm belief. "That's good because _Sarah Says_ : Drop your towel."

He dropped his towel.

}o{

One lengthy, vigorous and mutually rewarding game of _Sarah Says_ later, Chuck found himself half-asleep in the bed beside her. She was nestled comfortably against his body, half-smiling as she looked up at him. He looked back down at her, but just by moving his eyes. She laughed in gentle satisfaction. "What?"

"I don't want to get up, but I need to go to the lab for a little while. I guess we should eat and then go. Do we need to stop and get your car?"

"No," Sarah said, "Casey's going to drive it over tomorrow. He'll take the Land Rover home. What do you need to do?"

"I need to do a bit more tinkering with the Vortex, and then I need to start it up."

"Why on earth did you give it that silly name, Chuck?

"As I've told you, I had a lot of time on my hands that summer, and when I wasn't tinkering or spending Farmer Hinto-supervised time with Sally, I was reading _The Pound Era_. The Hugh Kenner book. Pound and some of his fellow poets used the image of a 'vortex' as a way of thinking…"

"…about their poetry," Sarah finished the thought. "Yeah, Carina has me reading Pound. The guy was an ass, a loon, but seriously brilliant. Not a poster boy for the sanity of true genius," Sarah noted as Chuck gave her a questioning look. She ignored it and went on. "Didn't he write an essay called 'Vortex': 'the vortex is the point of maximum energy'?"

"I know he wrote that essay and, yeah, that sounds like one of the things he says, one of the things that was in my head that summer, so I lifted the name. I do that a lot. Those passwords that got tried in my lab, well, other than 'Janet,'" he felt Sarah tense slightly at the name, "were all from that mysterious passage in Thoreau's _Walden_ , a passage in which he mentions losing a hound, a bay horse and a turtle dove, and notes that he is still looking for them, but without ever explaining what their symbolic value is, if any. I used each of those as names for other projects of mine."

"Do you mean, Chuck, that there are other projects out there that might cause us trouble?"

He pursed his lips. "Um, no. No. I don't think so. No." Were there?

"So, do you need to work on the Vortex?"

"Not much, I just need to alter it a smidgen," he pinched his fingers close together in front of them both, "otherwise, it may end up doing nothing more than opening all your neighbors' garage doors. I need to combine it with some items in my lab—and then I'm going to need some help from you."

He turned to her. He knew the work on the Vortex wouldn't take long once they got to the lab. They had time. They could eat later.

"Professor Walker," his voice sounded like that of a curious undergraduate, "can you explain again the difference between Purgatory and Paradise?"

Sarah's eyes lit up, and she offered the classic professorial response. "Since you're such a quick study, Mr. Bartowski, maybe _you_ could explain that to _the class_?"

Chuck rolled over and embraced her, his lips beginning to explain. The class moaned in response.

}o{

Sarah maneuvered the Land Rover into a parking spot in the lot near Chuck's lab. She couldn't stop smiling. Her world had awakened from its coma. It was alive again; she was alive in it. There was still vestigial sadness, and always would be, given her past—but she was moving ahead.

She had made herself promises about her present and future that had been anchored in a toxic spill of emotions from her past. She knew that it would take time to completely work through all of that—but she also knew she had begun.

Those burdens could, she believed, eventually be sloughed off—with Chuck's help. The promises of her past self were punishments of her future self for her past self's awful present—the awful present in which she watched Bryce die, the awful present in which he offered no explanation of his treachery, the awful present in which she believed that maybe…she deserved what he'd done somehow, or deserved nothing better.

That was twisty: the point was that the promises were made under duress—she was not obliged to keep them. Sally had been right. She had to decide whether to let those misbegotten promises add Chuck to the burdens she had been carrying, or to let Chuck help her with the burdens she had been carrying. She knew she had made the right decision—hence the smile she could not stop, even with a visit from Graham looming tomorrow. _I need to figure out how to thank Sally somehow._

Sarah turned off the engine and she and Chuck got out of the car. Sarah took his hand and he smiled at her when she did. As they made their way to the lab door, two students strolling, holding hands, came around the corner: Robert and Cheryl. Cheryl smiled and called out to Sarah.

"Professor Walker!"

Sarah stopped and so Chuck stopped too. Robert and Cheryl crossed the last of the distance and the two couples met each other on the sidewalk. Sarah recalled her envy of the two students after class a few days ago. Now, she stood holding Chuck's hand—her hand and his hand each full of the hand of the other.

"Hey, Cheryl, Robert," Sarah said, "this is Dr. Bartowski, Chuck." They nodded at him, recognizing him, and he nodded at them. "So, what are you two doing on campus on a holiday weekend? The place is deserted."

Robert looked at Cheryl and she answered, "Our families are both a long way away, and we were apart most of the summer, so we decided to take advantage of the long weekend and just have some time for ourselves. It's actually been great—one of the best weekends I've ever had."

Cheryl looked slightly embarrassed but very happy. She looked at Robert and he nodded, letting go of her hand. She held it out and, in the last light of the day, Sarah could see the sparkle of a diamond on Cheryl's finger. Sarah took her hand and spoke her admiration of the ring.

"I asked her a little while ago and she said yes", Robert explained, joy present in his voice. "We're both seniors—as you know, Professor Walker—and we are planning to get married sometime next summer…" He drifted out of his explanation and into the misty eyes of Cheryl, whose smile seemed preternaturally expansive and bright. They were slipping back into their own world—a two-seater world. Sarah knew a little bit about that; she and Chuck had spent most of the day in theirs.

"Well, I couldn't be happier for you! It's a wonderful thing for you both. Congrats and best wishes," Sarah enthused. Chuck chorused his agreement.

Cheryl leaned in close to Sarah, making sure Sarah saw the conspiratorial smile on her face. "Dr. Bartowski! _Good_ job, Professor." Sarah laughed along with Cheryl.

The young couple walked on. Their whispers and laughter sparking against the darkening day. Sarah and Chuck gazed after them, smiling.

"You know, Chuck, the other day I felt envious of those two—I envied them each other and their romance. I think I also envied the freshness of what they have. Is it bad for the students to be the teachers?"

"No. All good teachers learn from their students—and about all kinds of things. Those two seem great. You said 'envied'—past tense, Sarah. Now?"

"Now I know how they feel. I've not felt…not felt like this…ever, Chuck." She took his hand again—she had let go of it to take Cheryl's hand and admire the ring—and she squeezed it. She looked like she was gazing into the future, and she began to glow. But then she caught herself and looked at Chuck, her gaze back in the present. "Well, C'mon, _Tron_ -boy. Let's get ready to do whatever it is you have planned. Are you going to tell me about it?"

"Yes, I just thought it would make more sense if we talked about it here, so that I could show you and tell you what the plan is." Chuck held up the bag with the Vortex in it.

"Oooh. _Dr. Bartowski's Show and Tell_. Now that's a game we might want to add to _Sarah Says_." Even in the warmth of the gathering night, she could feel the heat rise from him.

"I get the feeling I'm never going to know exactly what game I'm playing with you," he chuckled.

She looked at him, using the darkness to enhance the deliberate unreadability of her features. "That's true…" she held her mask for a beat and then allowed herself to smile, "but you can trust me on this, Chuck. It will always be a game that we both win."

Shaking his head while continuing to chuckle, he punched the security code for the lab on the keypad and the door unlocked. They went inside.

}o{

Sarah had listened carefully. Chuck had explained it to her, and it seemed like a good plan to her. Simple and direct. It capitalized on Chuck's gifts in a way that she thought would make an impression on Graham. It utilized her special knowledge of Graham.

Chuck finished, put the Vortex back in the bag and they locked up the lab. Sarah drove Chuck to his apartment. It was in a nice but not a fancy building. Chuck needed some clean clothes and a toothbrush. Sarah had to confess that she was curious about where he lived and how he lived.

They climbed the steps to the second floor and walked Chuck's apartment. Chuck took out his keys and opened the door. He closed the door behind Sarah once she had gotten inside. He clicked the light switch.

Sarah was struck by all the color. No single item in the apartment was multicolored or bore a design. Everything was solid colors—mostly browns, greens, and blues, but with a smattering of reds and oranges. It was warm and inviting but not showy. On one wall were photos. On the opposite wall, there were a couple of original paintings.

It was the apartment of a man, but with no trace of being stereotypically male. The most striking feature of the apartment was…books. Almost all the walls were covered with bookcases. They were full, sometimes with books two rows deep. Books were stacked neatly on the coffee table, on the end tables, and in corners of the room. On the small table that looked to be both a desk and the place where Chuck ate his meals, they were more books—as well as a stack of graphic novels mixed with old comic books. Almost all of Sarah's books were all on the bookcases in her office. She didn't quite live with hers as Chuck did with his. She and Chuck dealt with their loneliness in different ways.

Sarah walked into the room while Chuck excused himself and went into the bedroom. He left the door open, obviously inviting her to follow if she chose to do so.

She stopped at the table. A copy of a noir detective novel, _The Mouse in the Mountain_ , was face down and open there. So too was a copy of Gottlob Frege's _Foundations of Arithmetic_. A piece of graph paper covered with various sketches and what looked like calculations peeked out from under the Frege book.

 _The Commonwealth Bulletin_ was on the table, and she noticed that it was bookmarked with a torn piece of paper. She picked it up and saw the bookmarked page was the one that had her information on it. There was a small pencil check in the margin beside her name and office number.

She smiled and put the Bulletin down. Although he had, in effect, already admitted it, she knew that he had not shown up at her door Friday night by coincidence. She also smiled because she knew that his entry in her Bulletin was highlighted in yellow. Each had been seriously on the other's mind.

She walked into Chuck's room. He had out a gym bag and was putting clothes and toiletries in it. On one wall, as she had guessed, was his _Tron_ poster. There was a desk in the room. On it were three large computer monitors. Beside his bed, on a nightstand, was a copy of Thoreau's _Walden_. It looked like it had been well read.

She left the bedroom to look at the photographs on the wall. She had not done more than notice them as she came in. There were only two pictures of Chuck, both as a boy—both with his parents and his sister, presumably. She was looking at the family photograph when he came in from the bedroom. There was no trace of his prizes or honors. He looked at one of the family pictures.

"My family. Mom and Dad died in a car accident when I was in my early teens and my sister, Ellie, raised me. She's a doctor back in LA—and a painter in her spare time. Those are hers." He gestured to the abstracts on the opposite wall. "I haven't seen her much lately. She's busy and she's never really forgiven me for how things ended—uh, how _she thought_ things ended with Janet. I guess I should talk to her about that. I'm sure of one thing: she'll like you. She tolerated Janet. Her anger about the ending was about my supposed behavior, not about the loss of Janet."

"Maybe…we can go and visit her at Thanksgiving?" Sarah tried to ask off-hand, but her eyes flicked up to Chuck as she did and her glance was serious. Chuck stepped to her in one long stride and took her hand.

"Really?" Excitement shone in his eyes.

"Really." She grinned at his excitement. She glanced down at her hand in his. His touch was warm and gentle, like the man.

"You'll like her husband—Captain Awesome."

"She's married to…a superhero?"

Chuck's chest shook with suppressed laughter. "Pretty much. Ellie doesn't much like it when I call him that. But wait until she realizes that my girlfriend is…well, _you_. I'll see her superhero—and raise her one kick-ass ninja Dante scholar." Sarah stood on her tiptoes and kissed Chuck on the cheek.

"How do you know I'm a kick-ass ninja, Chuck?"

"I may not like Graham, but I'm quite sure his go-to girl is going to be _a go-to girl_. And I...uh...have some experience with how you can...move." Sarah shook her head and kissed him again.

Chuck turned out the lights and they headed back to Sarah's. Soon it would be time for the labor of Labor Day.


	9. Chapter 9: Infernal Weenie Roast

**A/N1** Here we are at the end. My thanks to michaelfmx. He made the story better.

Don't own Chuck.

* * *

 **Miss Trust?**

Monday morning, September 4, 2017 (Labor Day)

Sarah's House

Boca Raton, Florida

* * *

"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do." Henry David Thoreau

* * *

CHAPTER 9 Infernal Weenie Roast

* * *

5:42 am

Chuck woke up just before dawn. Sarah was sleeping against him, but she had begun to thrash about. She moaned as if in pain. She woke up—at least a little. She realized what she had been doing and saw Chuck's concerned look. She tensed and rolled away from him. He put his hand on her back and rubbed it in small gentle circles. He felt the tension in her back ease. A moment later, she had rolled back over to him, allowing him to see her welling eyes and tear-streaked cheeks. She nestled against him.

"What is it, Sarah?" Chuck's question was tender, free of demand.

"Bad dreams. Very bad dreams. A tax that spies like me pay. No matter how often you tell yourself you're ok with what you've done, it turns out that you aren't—not really, not deep down. Even taking a life in self-defense sets deep things inside you into motion. More…questionable…life-taking sets even deeper things into motion. I guess we have a... natural piety for life, especially for other human lives, and taking human life always registers as natural impiety, as profane. Anyone who doesn't feel that is a sociopath—or on her way to being one.

"You've…stirred things deep inside of me, Chuck. That is a _good_ thing, a very good thing. But it also means that I…that _we_ …will have to face…my demons. Because they have been stirred too. Even as demons go, they're an…unpleasant lot." Her blue eyes pleaded with him in a way that her tone did not, although her tone was one of entreaty. "It's a lot to ask…"

"Asked and answered, Sarah. I'm here for you. They're our demons, now. You can count on me."

She nestled her head back into his chest and allowed herself to close her eyes again. Chuck held her, seeing tears escape her eyelids. After a while, she wiped her eyes and peered up at him.

"Thank you, Chuck."

She kissed him slowly and gently. He kissed her back slowly and gently…and then they made love slowly and gently. They fell back to sleep.

}o{

11:53 am

Chuck got out of bed first and began to work, boiling potatoes to make potato salad. Sarah got up a few minutes later and watched him work while she drank coffee, then she got out a knife and a cutting board and made a massive green salad.

Chuck hand-pattied the burgers and made sure that there were enough hot dogs and vegetables to grill. They put beer, soft drinks and bottled water in a cooler and set out a few bottles of wine. All the foodstuff that needed to be kept cold went back into the refrigerator.

Chuck had the bag of charcoal on the porch. He had double-checked the grill. He got a spatula for the burgers and a weenie fork for the hot dogs.

He and Sarah sat down and reviewed how he planned to handle Graham. Folks were supposed to begin dropping in at around 4 pm. Casey was due to arrive first.

Everything was ready.

}o{

4 pm

Late in the day, Casey arrived, squeezed into Sarah's Mazda. Gertrude and Tina were due to show up later. Casey could tell as soon as he entered the house that Walker and Bartowski were _together_. The question was— _how were they together_? Handler/asset or as a real couple? He could tell what Bartowski thought. Bartowski thought they were a couple. But what about Walker?

They sat down at the picnic table on the back porch. Chuck got Casey a beer and Casey lit a cigar. Casey sat and watched Walker and Bartowski as they sat across from him. Bartowski slipped his arm around Walker's waist and she leaned further into him. The cause of her reaction was Bartowski's action—not any conscious recognition of it on her part, not any decision about how to react. Nothing in Sarah's mind got between Chuck's bodily action and her bodily reaction.

Casey had enough experience to understand that even the best of spies knew that they were playing a role when they were playing a role. That knowledge always inserted itself, maybe briefly and subtly, but always, between the action of an asset and the handler's reaction. It was incredibly hard to pretend self-consciously to do something un-self-consciously. But what Walker did was not self-conscious. Chuck acted and she reacted—as if they were one body, not two. Casey grunted internally. _Good for them. Very good for them._

Casey could see that they fit together, and not just physically. They needed each other in complex ways.

Casey looked at Walker. "Glad to see you got what you asked for." She nodded, and then she smiled.

}o{

Sarah asked Casey if there had been any more incidents with Chuck's lab or on campus.

"No, nothing. It's like it never happened. Very strange. Why go to all that trouble just to give up?"

Sarah looked at Chuck and then back at Casey. "We know the answer and we're willing to tell you, but we don't want to put you in a difficult position. The…person behind this is powerful and—if not evil, ruthless in many ways. So, knowing could rebound on you. You have a good life here and a family…"

"Right. Right. Look, I appreciate it. But whoever did this, did it on my campus, on my beat, to my people. I want to know."

"Ok." Sarah sighed. "It was my former boss, Langston Graham."

"That ass that directs the spook show?" Casey looked like he might turn his head and spit.

"Yeah, that ass," Chuck confirmed. "He was trying to scare me, intimidate me into giving him my research project...on decryption. He arranged the break-in and the SUVs. That was one half of his plan."

"One half?" Casey was puzzled for a second, then he saw Walker's face. "So, you were under orders all along?" His tone took on a sharp edge. Both Chuck and Sarah sat up straighter. Chuck waited for Sarah to speak.

"No, at least not in the way you think. Maybe it would be better to say that I was Plan B, not the other half of the plan.

"Anyway, Graham sent me an email note asking me for a…favor. He wanted me to push Chuck toward giving Graham what he wanted. He sent it to me around the time of his 'attack'—the lab break-in and the SUVs. I didn't see the email until Saturday at a coffee shop."

Chuck was looking at Casey and nodding as Sarah continued.

"We've told Graham that Chuck will give him what he wants but that he has to come here today—he is due in an hour or so—to get it. It would be a help to us if you could keep everyone outside while we talk to him in here. Chuck has a plan. We're going to give him a small dose of what he wants to inoculate him against wanting more."

"Chuck's plan? Should be good," Casey grinned. "Yeah, I'll do the crowd control. Let me know if you need anything else. I have your backs. The only thing I like less than spooks," he looked at Sarah, "present company excluded, is spook bureaucrats."

Casey's face then took on a strange look. It took Sarah a minute to recognize it as a reluctant curiosity. "Is there something you want to ask me, Casey?"

He nodded almost imperceptibly. "Are you _the Ice Queen_?" His voice was quiet, even though no one else was around.

Sarah felt herself blush. She glanced nervously at Chuck, who had turned to her, clearly curious to hear her answer too, to see her answer. She could see that he had heard the name before—obviously from Casey. Sarah dropped her voice as she answered, matching her volume to Casey's. "Yes. I was the Ice Queen."

Casey looked at her appraisingly—with an obvious note of respect but also of worry. He then turned his appraisal on Chuck. "Have you gotten any clearer on what that means, Chuck? Do you really understand who you're holding?" Despite what he was asking, Casey's voice was gentle—for him.

Chuck sighed before he answered. As he spoke, he underlined each word carefully.

"Sarah's told me some things. I have…um, recently read about others. I know, Casey; I understand. Here's the thing, Casey, those missions, the things Sarah has done, they're not reasons for me to fear or mistrust her. They are part of the past of the woman I'm presently with and that I…hope to be with…in the future. They are part of the past of the woman I trust with…my life." Now, Chuck glanced nervously at her. She smiled at him—a smile she felt well up from deep in her heart. He smiled back and she settled even more completely into his embrace, into his arm around her waist.

Casey sat for a moment and gazed at them. He grinned and shook his head. "Tron and the Ice Queen. Electronics and espionage. Java and espresso. Who'd a-thunk it?" His voice was growling but merry.

Chuck started to laugh—then looked at Casey closely. "Wait. 'Java and espresso': was that a twisty double Italian coffee-computer pun?" Sarah was lost for a second, then caught up. She saw Casey's grin widen. All three began to chuckle.

}o{

4:45 pm

Casey helped Chuck fire up the grill. Casey seemed to know a lot about grills and grilling, and he was happy to share his vast knowledge with Chuck. Chuck listened to it all with a grin.

Morgan and Alex arrived carrying a huge pan of baked beans and a large thermos of cold brew coffee. Chuck ran into Morgan at the coffee shop a few times, it turned out, but they'd never really talked. Sarah was pleased to see Chuck and Morgan talking more seriously. Morgan knew who Chuck was, but was intimidated by him. But with Sarah introducing them and telling him about Chuck, they fell into immediate conversation about computers, video games, and movies. Within ten minutes, they were running through the entire Cantina scene from _Star Wars_ , including all the alien beeps and noises.

Alex walked to Sarah, rolling her eyes at the strange cacophony arising from the two men.

"Sarah, we're so glad you asked us to come over. You know you're one of our favorite customers," she leaned in to whisper to Sarah, "and…Chuck…wow! He's great. Morgan is a _huge_ fan. He's talked about little else since Commonwealth hired him. I've enjoyed getting to know him when he's come into the shop. He's a good guy. But Morgan hid every time he came in. I think he has a really serious man-crush—a _hetero life partners_ kind of crush."

}o{

5:30 pm

Hurricane Carina made landfall with a luau in her wake. She had on a revealing tank top and a pair of cut off denim shorts. She also had on a small apron emblazoned with the word, "ReJoyce!" over a picture of Joyce himself.

"Here comes everybody," she yelled to everyone and no one as she came in. She had a bottle of single malt scotch in her hand. She wasn't really watching where she was going and she bumped into Morgan—who had gotten up so that she could have his seat.

They went down in a heap of his beard and her long legs. Carina managed to save the scotch. As they tried to extricate themselves from one another, Alex stood over them, glaring. Morgan noticed her and tried to get up as quickly as possible. Carina hadn't expected him to move so fast, and she was still partially bent over as he stood. They bumped heads hard. Each stumbled away from the other, hand on forehead.

Alex chuffed a bit at the sight, then moved to tend to her wounded husband. Sarah got Carina into a chair and poured her some of the single malt in a paper cup. Carina took a sip, rubbed her forehead one last time, and then looked at Sarah questioningly. "Say, isn't that the coffee gnome?" Sarah glared at Carina and Carina dropped her voice as she finished. "Yes," Sarah whispered, "he owns the campus coffee shop—and he's my friend, so play nice." At the word, 'friend', Carina's eyes narrowed. Then she saw Chuck standing tall over the grill, in a t-shirt and shorts.

"Yum, Sarah, yum. _Good_ for you, girl. That man can take a dip in my stream of consciousness any time he wants and swim there for as long as he wants…" Carina looked at Sarah expecting a smile but saw only warning lights in Sarah's eyes. "Oh. Oh, I see. Chuck's not just your…Labor Day picnic. Oh. Well, I'll shut my mouth then. _Really good for you, girl_." The warning lights dimmed and Sarah smiled at her friend. Carina poured Sarah some single malt in another cup and toasted, motioning to Sarah and then to Chuck. They each drank to that.

}o{

Sarah heard the doorbell ring and walked to the door to answer it. There stood Langston Graham, grinning at her. On each side of him was a mountainous agent. Sarah stepped back and Graham entered, scanning the room for Chuck. Not seeing him, he turned to Sarah.

"Thanks for your help, Agent Walker."

"Professor Walker, or, if you must, Sarah." The words came out slow and cold, a sheet of ice off her tongue. Graham visibly winced. His expression became wary.

"Well, where is our package? You seem to be…entertaining…so we can take it and leave."

Graham was clearly caught off-guard by the smell of burgers and the sound of music and laughter from outside. Through the backdoor, Sarah knew he could see Casey dancing with Gertrude, and Morgan with Alex. Carina was laughing at something Chuck had said. They were watching the dancers and talking about her Joyce class with Tina listening in.

Graham glared at Sarah. She knew she hadn't responded or moved. She was happy just standing and watching Chuck and her friends interact. But she knew Graham had to be handled.

"Have a seat, Langston." His head snapped at that. She had never used his first name before. He didn't like it.

She waited until he seated himself at the table. He gestured at the two large men. " _This_ is Mr. Smith and _this_ is Mr. Smith." One moved toward the front door. The other toward the back door.

Sarah got Chuck's attention. He saw Graham. Chuck took a couple of minutes to grab three plates and fill them with food before he came into the kitchen. He placed one plate in front of Graham. He handed one to each of the Mr. Smiths, and each seemed pleased to be included in the party in a small way.

}o{

6 pm

Graham looked at his plate—a hot dog with mustard and slaw, a generous helping of potato salad and some baked beans. Chuck and Sarah were seated at her small kitchen table with him. Each of the two Mr. Smiths had his hotdog in his hand, half consumed in one bite, chewing in obvious enjoyment. Graham pushed his plate away. He preferred French food, _haute cuisine_. He couldn't believe that Sarah, a tasteful veteran of cuisines the world over, could have choked any of this down. Weenies! Bartowski gave _Langston Graham_ a weenie!

But the choker was that his golden girl was obviously smitten with the computer engineer. How was that possible? They were _together._ How could she have chosen this circuit board clown? OK, admittedly, he was smart. Smarter than anyone Graham had on the research side of the CIA. Much smarter. Still, he was…well, him. She was her. Maybe she really had burnt out; maybe this was the special hell for burnouts—yoked to brainy nerds in fetid, swampy Florida. Boca _Goddamn_ Raton. What was _Langston Graham_ doing in Boca Raton?

Graham pushed the plate away. "Alright, Bartowski, enough of this stupid charade. I don't know what you two think you're doing. Are you going to give me what I want?" Without waiting, he turned a sneer to Sarah. "Frankly, Walker, for you to be with this…man boggles my mind. He is beneath you."

"No, Graham, he's not. He's not the type you think is my type, true. It turns out my type is tall, lanky, thoroughly good computer geniuses. Admittedly, not an easy type to find—but so worth it when you do." She smiled at Chuck and he smiled back with a touch of embarrassment. He then turned his attention to Graham.

"What do we think we are doing? Well, Langston, I brought you here so that I could say this to your face. I appreciate that you would like to have the project and the Vortex and even me, but the answer on all three is: 'Sorry, but _no_ , thank you.'"

"Bartowski, I _asked_ —but I'm not really asking. I'm the Director of the CIA, and you _will_ …give me what I want." Graham said this with perfect matter-of-factness, perfect assurance.

"No, I won't. This is the last time I say no, Graham."

"Well, it's the last time I pretend to ask. Give me the project and the Vortex and I'll let you stay here in this outdoor sweatshop instead of throwing your skinny ass into a bunker."

"Tell me something, Graham. How did you come to know about the project and the Vortex? Maybe we can trade. But you have to start."

Graham bared his teeth in a silent snarl—but then he began to talk. He believed the situation was now his to control.

"Fine, I may as well tell you. It will amuse me to tell you, and I'm curious how it will strike Walker. A few weeks ago, a long-running CIA operation finished. The target was Lazlo Mahnovski." Graham paused, watching for Chuck's reaction. Chuck's eyes widened just a bit.

"Yes, your former student. He never forgave you for being smarter than him, Bartowski. _Hell hath no fury like an academic outsmarted_. He was attempting to sell weapons to a foreign power. The woman working for him, the woman who brokered the deal, was his right-hand woman, a gifted con artist, a mistress of disguises, named Jill Roberts. I think you knew her as your fiancée, Janet Sanders." Graham's teeth showed again, another snarl. But he seemed disappointed that neither Chuck nor Sarah seemed rattled by the Saunders revelation. "We captured her, and we captured her best friend and partner in crime, Erin Suzeman. I think you knew her as Tamara."

Chuck didn't blink. "Roberts, Suzeman—neither of their real names means anything to me, Graham. Of course, Mahnovski's name means something to me. People at Stanford called him 'the poor man's Bartowski'. It drove him crazy. I tried to tell him that it was nonsense—that he was brilliant, and that research was not a competition with other researchers, but a battle against ignorance. He wouldn't listen. He bolted for the private sector. I knew he was making huge amounts of money. But I really didn't keep up with him."

"Well, he kept up with you. He stole minor designs from you. I guess you didn't care or just didn't pay much attention." Graham shook his head at Bartowski's carelessness or obtuseness.

"He sent Jill to you to find out about the project. He had been watching you when he was at Stanford and knew you were working on something big, but he also knew you kept an eye on him and he was never able to figure it out what you were up to. So, later, when he met Jill and found out about her skills, he sent her to you to steal anything she could, but especially to find out about the project. I suspect he also wanted to use her to hurt you—and I gather he succeeded." Graham radiated gleeful malice.

"So, Roberts was to find out about the project and she did, at least a little—and she found out about the Vortex too. But Mahnovski wasn't good enough—no one he had available to him was good enough—to take the information she gave Mahnovski and recreate your project. Mahnovski thought he could build a Vortex himself, and he wasted a lot of time on that. He should have just stolen the one you left with the Hintos. But his ego demanded he do it himself. He was going to beat you at last. I guess that will be my job now. My pleasure, rather.

"She told me all of this to get us to go easy on her. She gave up Mahnovski and Suzeman."

"So, once Roberts told you all of this, you decided to scare me into giving you the project and the Vortex?" Graham saw Walker's vulnerable glance at Bartowski and his reassuring smile. Graham began to wonder if he really did have control of the situation. He'd never seen Walker open, vulnerable in that way. He wasn't sure he recognized her. He didn't think it…possible. An unsettled feeling passed over him.

"Well, Graham, in exchange for that bit of information, I offer you a bit of information. I've used the Vortex to gain access to, and make copies of, the operations you've authorized while you have been Director of the CIA. I must admit, you've cut quite a swath across many countries. I've distributed copies of those files to dozens of electronic data banks around the world. Hard copies in sealed envelopes are also on their way to various law offices around the world, with strict instructions for when they should be opened and what should be done with the contents. If any of a variety of events occur, involving me, Sarah, my family or friends or hers, then those files will be sent to various newspapers, television stations, government agencies, and even a few tabloids."

Graham felt a sliver of ice enter his spine. "You've done _what,_ Bartowski?"

"Exactly what I said." Bartowski got up and walked to the refrigerator. He reached up to the top of it and retrieved a folder. He came back to the table and pushed the folder to Graham. He then looked at Graham's plate. "Are you going to eat that?" He gestured to the hot dog. Graham shook his head.

Bartowski shrugged and grabbed it, taking a large bite. He chewed while Graham glanced inside the file. Graham peeked up and noticed that Bartowski had a speck of mustard on the corner of his mouth, but then he saw Walker pick up a napkin and smilingly wipe the mustard away. She leaned in for a kiss. Graham became increasingly sure he was trapped in a Twilight Zone episode. Sarah Walker did not _dote fondly_ —not on anyone.

Shaking his head, Graham returned his attention to the folder. In it were printouts of highly classified documents, ones that Graham had taken to be forever hidden. There were only a few, but Graham knew they stood for so many more. Any of them would ruin him, reveal just how far he had pushed—abused—his power, how often he had used his power to further augment his power, how often he had used Walker and other agents to advance his own private agenda.

"You see, Graham, I knew how to look and Sarah knew where to look. So last night we did a little electronic spelunking, some copying, and some mailing. I'd say we found buried treasure."

Graham was too furious and too frightened to respond clearly. He heard himself grunt out a "Damn you" at Bartowski and Walker.

Bartowski grinned at Graham. He was completely calm. He was in control of the situation.

"Look, Langston, I realize that all this is cliché. Any number of spy stories end like this, with the bad guy—or in your case, the power-hungry bureaucrat—blackmailed into submission.

"Think of this as a malicious sort of celebrity roast. Do you remember those from TV? People get together and give someone a hard time about his or her life? No? Oh, well.

"I admit it: this ain't original. But that makes me like it _more_ —the Director of the CIA done in by a hacker using a hackneyed plot device. Original or not, you can see the threat here is real. I have no desire to make good on it—but I will if you force me. Why don't we leave with this a comedy, not a tragedy, Langston?

"You are Washington's creation; Washington can have you. I'm not interested in bringing you down, just in getting you to leave me alone. And that's what I want—never to hear from you again," Bartowski took Walker's hand and she turned to face Graham, "and Sarah never wants to hear from you again. Just. Leave. Us. Alone. There's a sheet in the folder that outlines the things you might do that will result in the dispersal of that information—but you understand: Leave us and everyone we care about alone."

Graham considered his options. Bartowski's project would have been nice. It would have put Graham in a position of remarkable power. But he was already powerful as it was, and he was holding similar threats to the one Bartowski was now holding over his head over the heads of any number of powerful people in Washington. All in all, it was disappointing and annoying to lose to Bartowski, the project, and Walker, but he could live with it—if he had to. He was a pragmatist, after all. The greater good.

"So, what will you do with the project, Bartowski?"

"Kill it. It was a bad idea, I realize, even with the failsafe I had planned. You folks in the intelligence community will have to muddle through without my skeleton key, without the project. No one knows about this but you, me, Roberts and Mahnovski. You should be able to keep a lid on it and on them. If you don't, well, that's one of the things listed on the sheet in the file. I'll never finish the project. And I have new things to think about these days, things…outside…the lab." He winked at Walker and she winked back. She got up and went outside.

Graham felt mildly sickened by the innuendo and the winking. Walker with Bartowski, Walker teaching at Commonwealth College—it was like taking the finest surgical scalpel and using it to open packing crates. What a waste! Still, the Farm brought in fresh faces all the time. Maybe he'd never find another Ice Queen—but there'd eventually be an Ice Princess, or an Ice Duchess. Someone icy.

Graham picked up the file and headed for the door. The Mr. Smith from the backdoor put his plate on the table and thanked Chuck. The other from the front door did the same. Graham rolled his eyes. Then they followed Graham out the door.

}o{

6:34 pm

Sarah came in from outside just as they left through the front door. She had her arm behind her back and she whisked past Chuck and out the front door after Graham. Chuck saw what she was holding, and, after a couple of moment's shock during which he stood still while he processed what he saw, he followed her.

}o{

6:35 pm

Sarah followed Graham to his car. She looked back over her shoulder. Chuck hadn't followed her, not yet anyway. When Graham got to the rear door of his car, Mr. Smith leaned down to open it. He clicked the handle and pulled the door toward his great barreled chest, holding it for Graham. Sarah had the weenie fork from the grill behind her back, but both Mr. Smiths seemed to think the ordeal was over; they had relaxed. They just looked at her.

Sarah spun into the air and brought her foot up and around, exploding into the head of the Mr. Smith standing beside her. He crumpled to the sidewalk, out cold. Before the Mr. Smith holding the door could react, she had landed from her kick and was able to shoot out a fist, drilling him in the throat. He made a gurgling, gagging sound and began sucking for air, bending over instinctively to try to catch his breath. She whipped her knee up into his head as he bent down, and he too crumpled to the sidewalk. She heard the screen door behind her close.

}o{

6:36 pm

Graham was frozen in place—unable to process what had just happened, staggered by the quick and decisive violence. Graham had created her, created this weapon, but he had only seen its effects. He had never really witnessed it cause those effects, seen his Enforcer… _enforce_. He was—he realized—staring down the double blue barrels of the blonde gun he had fashioned.

His fear was complete. It had been years since he had been in the field, and he had been a mediocre field agent at best. He had known it, which was why he'd taken to a desk so early. He was happy enough to order violence—but he was unable to face it, on either the giving or receiving end.

Sarah's eyes were the blue of a welder's arc flash. For Graham to stare into them was for him to risk burning his retinas. He closed his eyes as hers focused on his face. He felt the tines of the weenie fork press into the soft flesh of his throat, one of them piercing it just slightly.

He opened his eyes. Sarah was smiling at him. It was the most frightening sight of his life. He was glad he hadn't eaten anything.

"Graham," she said, breathing only a little hard, "you understand, don't you, what my boyfriend can do to your _career_. He can—and if you push him, he will—bomb your career into a crater. You've no way to stop that if you make any move against him or against me. But I want you to understand what my boyfriend's girlfriend—that'd be me, just in case the math eludes you—can do to _you_.

"I don't think you've ever thought that through. But you know my relevant skill set better than anyone. Do you think there's anywhere you can _hide_ from me? Do you think there is anywhere I can't find you, any street you can walk down on which I can't find a rooftop vantage point, any bathroom you can visit where I might not be waiting? Do you? Are you prepared to have me as your mortal enemy?"

Graham shook his head—gently, so as not to drive the weenie fork tine further into his flesh.

"You've sent me into the inferno more than once, and yet here I stand, Graham. I've no desire to hurt you any more than I'm hurting you right now; I want this part of my life to be over. And it will be, so long as you leave us alone. But if you so much as breathe a threat against the new life I am building here or the man I am hoping to build it with, you'll not breathe for long. I'm your worst nightmare, Graham, a two-edged sword you forged and can't now control."

Sarah relaxed her hand and the weenie fork lost contact with Graham's throat. He felt a tiny rivulet of sweat—or of blood—or of a tear—run down his throat and onto his chest. He tried to smile and produced instead a wild-looking grimace. The two Mr. Smiths were coming around.

"Take your boys and go back to DC. You can trust my boyfriend. You can also trust me. Have a good flight."

Graham dived into the back seat of his car, yelling for the two Mr. Smiths to get in and go. They lumbered woozily into their seats and drove away. Sarah stood on the sidewalk for a moment, watching the black SUV disappear into the humidity of Boca. She knew Graham. He was terrified—for his career and for his person. He would leave them alone.

}o{

6:39 pm

Chuck stepped to her and put his arm around her. She glanced at him anxiously.

"I heard the screen door shut. How much of _that_ did you see and hear?"

The blue eyes that asked the question were soft, exposed, electric. "I never want you to see or hear me like that again, Chuck."

He leaned down and kissed her. He could feel her tremble against his arm, and he could feel heat rolling off her—the aftershocks and after-effects of her encounter with Graham. She looked into his eyes with a tentative smile, but couldn't hold his gaze. He kissed her again, softly.

"Are you sure what you just witnessed didn't mess things up for us, Chuck, didn't mess us up?" She still could not quite look at him steadily.

"We're good, Sarah. _You're_ good."

"What I just did and said…Your feelings…for me…they won't change, they haven't changed?"

"Well, a little, I guess…"

Sarah dropped her eyes and her shoulders slumped.

Chuck continued, spiraling a little. "No, no, What I mean is that I think I'm falling in love with you—oh, and I was right, I knew it: You are a kick-ass ninja. And I think I am falling head over heels in love with you." _I am in love with you_.

She brightened, not just her eyes. _She_ brightened. She smiled as she lifted her face to him. He saw her try to speak in response and saw that the words were there but that she could not yet speak them. He leaned in and kissed her again.

"No hurry, Sarah. No rush. I didn't and I'll never say something like that to you _quid pro quo_. It'll always be a gift, always be yours for free."

She brightened even more. She finally spoke. "So, you _think_ you're falling in love with me? You aren't sure?"

His eyes sparkled. "Well, to be honest, no. I worry that I might just be blinded by my newly developed desire to play _Dr. Bartowski's Show and Tell_. It sounds like…uh…quite a game."

Sarah leaned in close to Chuck's ear and in a raw, breathy whisper, she said, "After everyone leaves, how about _I show_ and _you tell?_ I could hear all that again—but with us both in a different…posture." _I am in love with you._

They kissed and Chuck took Sarah's hand. They started back inside. She still had the weenie fork in her other hand. She stopped them and handed the fork to Chuck. He accepted it from her, taking a moment to brandish it like a cutlass. They both laughed and then they joined the party.

* * *

 **A/N2** Happy Valentine's Day!


End file.
